Maggie Shipstead · 2021 · global
Maggie Shipstead's sweeping 2021 novel follows Marian Graves, a fictional aviator, from a Montana childhood to the ends of the earth. Orphaned by a shipwreck and raised in Missoula, she falls in love with flight, buys her way into the sky by running bootleg liquor over the Canadian line for a dangerous husband, then flees him to fly freight in the Alaskan bush and, in the war, to ferry warplanes for Britain's Air Transport Auxiliary. All of it is prologue to her masterwork, the great circle: a north-south circumnavigation over both poles that no one had flown. In 1950 she set out, and on the last leg home, near the Ross Ice Shelf, she vanished, leaving only a journal behind.
- 1Missoula
Orphaned by a shipwreck and raised by a dissolute uncle in Missoula, Marian sees a pair of barnstormers land one day and knows she must fly.
- 2The Canadian Border
To pay for lessons and a plane, she runs bootleg liquor by air across the Canadian line for the bootlegger she disastrously marries.
- 3Fairbanks
Fleeing her husband under a false name, she flies freight through the Alaskan bush, carrying mail and dogs and dynamite in the rough early days of northern aviation.
- 4England
When war comes she crosses to England and joins the women of the Air Transport Auxiliary, ferrying fighters and bombers from factory to airfield.
- 5Auckland
Marian Graves lifts off from Auckland to fly the great circle, a single line over both poles and clear around the turning world.
- 6Hawaii
North across the empty Pacific, island to island.
- 7Alaska
Up the long curve of the Americas to Alaska and the edge of the ice.
- 8The North Pole
Over the top of the world, where every direction is south.
- 9Antarctica
Down the far meridian to the white continent, and across its frozen interior.
- 10The Ross Ice Shelf
Near the Ross Ice Shelf, with one last leg home to Auckland, Marian and her navigator vanish; only her journal is ever found.