Book Review of Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead: An Epic Story of Flight, Freedom & a Woman Who Refused a Small Life

Some books feel intimate.

Some books feel enormous.

Great Circle feels enormous.

Maggie Shipstead’s sweeping novel follows Marian Graves, a woman who becomes obsessed with flying and ultimately attempts to circumnavigate the globe over both poles. Running alongside Marian’s story is a modern-day storyline about Hadley Baxter, a Hollywood actress cast to portray the vanished aviator decades later.

At more than 600 pages, this is not a little weekend romance.

It’s a big book about a big life.

Marian Graves wants to fly

Marian and her twin brother Jamie survive a sinking ocean liner as infants and are eventually raised by their uncle in Montana.

Then Marian sees barnstorming pilots.

And that’s it.

She wants to fly.

Not as a hobby.

Not occasionally.

Flying becomes the organizing force of her life.

She pursues it through Prohibition, Alaska, World War II and eventually toward an almost impossible goal: flying around the world pole to pole.

Marian wants freedom more than almost anything

Flight is obviously important to the book, but freedom is really the larger obsession.

Marian repeatedly runs into people and institutions that want to define what her life should look like.

Woman.

Wife.

Pilot.

Employee.

Lover.

She keeps trying to slip outside those definitions.

And sometimes that freedom costs her enormously.

Hadley Baxter

The second timeline follows Hadley, a famous actress trying to escape the identity created for her by Hollywood.

When she’s cast as Marian in a movie about the aviator’s disappearance, she starts trying to understand who Marian really was.

The two women lived in completely different eras, but both understand the claustrophobia of having strangers decide who you’re supposed to be.

That parallel gradually becomes more important as the novel unfolds.

This book goes everywhere

Montana.

Alaska.

London.

Wartime Europe.

Hollywood.

Antarctica.

Shipstead gives the story an enormous physical scale to match Marian’s ambitions.

Great Circle was shortlisted for both the 2021 Booker Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

And you can understand why.

This feels like a book attempting to capture an entire life rather than simply one chapter of it.

Final thoughts

Great Circle is the kind of novel that reminds you how enormous a single person’s life can be.

People disappear.

Stories get rewritten.

History turns real human beings into symbols.

And sometimes someone living decades later has to try to piece together who they actually were.

Marian Graves spends her entire life attempting to make the world large enough for her ambitions.

And by the end, Great Circle feels appropriately huge.

This isn’t necessarily the book I’d grab if I wanted something light and quick.

But if you’re in the mood to completely disappear into another person’s life for hundreds of pages, it’s an impressive place to go.