Great circle, paperback/maggie shipstead

Relentlessly exciting .

My top recommendation for this summer.

--Ron Charles, The Washington Post NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER - A TODAY SHOW #ReadWithJenna BOOK CLUB PICK - The unforgettable story of a daredevil female aviator determined to chart her own course in life, at any cost-- Great Circle soars and dips with dizzying flair .

an expansive story that covers more than a century and seems to encapsulate the whole wide world ( Boston Globe ).

A masterpiece .

One of the best books Ive ever read.

Courtney Sullivan, author of Friends and Strangers After being rescued as infants from a sinking ocean liner in 1914, Marian and Jamie Graves are raised by their dissolute uncle in Missoula, Montana.

There--after encountering a pair of barnstorming pilots passing through town in beat-up biplanes--Marian commences her lifelong love affair with flight.

At fourteen she drops out of school and finds an unexpected and dangerous patron in a wealthy bootlegger who provides a plane and subsidizes her lessons, an arrangement that will haunt her for the rest of her life, even as it allows her to fulfill her destiny: circumnavigating the globe by flying over the North and South Poles.

A century later, Hadley Baxter is cast to play Marian in a film that centers on Marians disappearance in Antarctica.

Vibrant, canny, disgusted with the claustrophobia of Hollywood, Hadley is eager to redefine herself after a romantic film franchise has imprisoned her in the grip of cult celebrity.

Her immersion into the character of Marian unfolds, thrillingly, alongside Marians own story, as the two womens fates--and their hunger for self-determination in vastly different geographies and times--collide.

Epic and emotional, meticulously researched and gloriously told, Great Circle is a monumental work of art, and a tremendous leap forward for the prodigiously gifted Maggie Shipstead .

About author(s): MAGGIE SHIPSTEAD is the New York Times best-selling author of the novels Astonish Me and Seating Arrangements and the winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction.

She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.