The early sections of the novel, set in 2014, are wincingly hilarious. She finds herself powerfully, unexpectedly drawn to digging out the truth of Marian’s fate. Running in parallel to Marian’s story is a 21st-century narrative: that of Hadley Baxter, a Hollywood ingenue who is attempting to rescue her reputation by making a film about Marian. Yet Great Circle is more than a historical novel, and the book has more than one heroine.

It was on a trip to New Zealand that the idea for this book first arrived: at Auckland airport she saw a statue of Jean Batten, whose epic flights in the 1930s – she was the first person to fly solo from London to New Zealand – made history, though her name is now largely forgotten. Her debut, Seating Arrangements, won the Dylan Thomas prize in 2012 she is also a travel writer whose journeys have taken her to both the Arctic and the Antarctic. It’s no spoiler to reveal her fate, for her disappearance, described in the novel’s first pages, is the spark of Shipstead’s third novel. She and her navigator, Eddie Bloom, vanished somewhere over the Ross ice shelf, on the very last leg of their journey, heading up towards New Zealand.

By that time she was, as the reader will learn, an accomplished aviator, a woman obsessed with flight since her girlhood in the wilds of Montana. In this enthralling novel, Graves disappeared in 1950 while attempting to fly around the world – longitudinally, passing over both north and south poles. With the fictional Marian Graves, Maggie Shipstead creates a compelling, original heroine all her own. But then, of course, I think as with expeditioners, the question arises of now what? You know, the center of my life was suddenly gone and facing the blank page again for the first time in seven years was not easy.T he early history of aviation is full of courageous, fascinating women: Amy Johnson and Amelia Earhart are probably the best known. And so I certainly felt a sense of relief at the end. I definitely was depleted by this book by the time I was done, I took pretty much everything I was preoccupied with and thinking about during this time, I did a lot of travel, both coincidentally and for the purposes of seeing this place, it was really important to me to see Antarctica, it was important to me to see the Arctic.

On finishing the novel, compared to finishing something like an Antarctic expedition I've seen the edge of it, although the piece of ice where Little America was has long since broken off and floated away and returned to the ocean. It was a little confusing because Little America existed in multiple iterations. I read his accounts of his expeditions and what I could find by other members of them. actually built on the the Ross Ice Shelf, floating ice shelf. So this was one of Richard Byrd's expedition bases. Book Reviews With 'Arrangements' And 'The Rest,' Two Debut Novelists Arrive

Shipstead great circle