And during that time, the novel I thought I was going to write just died on me. Seating Arrangements had come out and I was in edits for Astonish Me, and I had brought the beginning of another novel with me on the trip. How did the idea for Great Circle come about?īack in 2012, when I first started traveling by myself, I sort of puttered around the South Island for three weeks.

We sat down with the writer to learn more about her inspiration behind the book and how she folded in her own real-life travel experiences. Shipstead is best known for her two previous novels-her bestselling debut, 2012’s Seating Arrangements, and 2014’s Astonish Me, winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize-and says she’d been working loosely on another novel when she had the idea for Great Circle. We feel their closeness as they share similar struggles and ambitions.

Even though the two women are separated by time and geography, we come to know more about each one through alternating perspectives: Marian’s story told in third person, Hadley’s in first. It is hardly surprising, then, that I tore through my copy of Maggie Shipstead’s ambitious new novel, Great Circle-our May AFAReads selection-which weaves together the stories of two women: famous aviator Marian Graves, who disappears on a flight to the north and south poles, and actress Hadley Baxter, who is hired a century later to portray Marian in a film. At a time when I wasn’t flying, soaring and spinning through the sky via the escapades of these women was a fitting substitute-no airsickness included. Off I went, full throttle into the achievements and legacies of women pilots like Florence Klingensmith, Amy Johnson, and Katherine Cheung. I’d known of Bessie Coleman and Amelia Earhart, sure, but as I learned more about Bland, I realized how unfamiliar I was with the myriad other women who had made aviation history. I find some parts so transporting I could re-read them endlessly.In 2020, I spent months researching the life of pioneering aviator Lilian Bland. 'A feast of a book,' said Shipstead, 'A grand but precise collage of voices and styles and points of view, Byatt’s 1990 novel is a romantic and intellectual epic about two modern literary academics uncovering an unknown love affair between two Victorian poets. The book is a mysterious love story with a passion for literature at its core. Set in the 1990s, the story involves the pair researching the lives of two Victorian poets by combing through their journals, poems and letters.

The great circle book