Often when we talk about a big, ambitious book, we reach for the language of geography. We describe the terrain it covers; we say that it sprawls, or ranges widely. The book is framed as a kind of passage through the world: we might talk about a protagonist’s journey, or an author’s exploration of a topic.
In award-winning author Maggie Shipstead’s new novel, all of those analogies are made literal.
Great Circle’s 600 pages span a full century and the entire planet. The book tells the story of Marian Graves, a fictional female pilot who disappeared in 1950 while attempting an unprecedented north-south circumnavigation of the earth. She had only one leg left in her trip, a final leap from Antarctica to New Zealand, when she vanished, Earhart-style, in the South Pacific. Shipstead takes readers through the events of Marian’s life leading up to that moment, from her parents’ doomed marriage and her unorthodox childhood, roaming semi-feral with her twin brother in the Mo