Unfortunately, I couldn't get into this -- I'm not going to put a proper review here as a result. I didn't think that this engaged me at the time I tried to read it (I have now tried about four times; I know it's been ages, but I've been trying so hard!!!!).

It's not, necessarily, that there's anything wrong with the writing -- I just found the pacing dull and I didn't like the characters. One day, I really hope to love this because I've tried so hard. Sometimes books don't come to you at the right time.

This book tells the story of Marian Graves who disappeared in 1950 whilst attempting a North-South circumnavigation of the poles.

Marian and her twin brother Jamie were brought up by their uncle in Montana after losing their mother in a shipwreck.

Marian becomes obsessed with planes after the town is visited by a couple who fly a small plane. She drops out of school at fourteen to follow her passion for aviation. She becomes a pilot after a wealthy bootlegger provides her with a plane and lessons. But this comes at a cost!!

A century later actress Hadley Baxter is cast to play Marian Graves in a film about the pilot's disappearance in Antarctica. As the film is being shot Hadley becomes obsessed with Marian Baxter's life and finds secrets that have never been revealed.

The novel is long but the characters and stories are so beautifully detailed that I just became fully engaged with this book.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy in exchange for an honest review.

This is a truly engrossing read with so many different & sometimes difficult things that Women had to go through & in many ways & in many places still do even though we are now living in the 21st Century. I found every aspect of Marion's Life compelling to read . #NetGalley, #GoodReads, #Amazon.co.uk, #FB, #Instagram, #<img src="https://www.netgalley.com/badge/8a5b541512e66ae64954bdaab137035a5b2a89d2" width="80" height="80" alt="200 Book Reviews" title="200 Book Reviews"/>, #<img src="https://www.netgalley.com/badge/ef856e6ce35e6d2d729539aa1808a5fb4326a415" width="80" height="80" alt="Reviews Published" title="Reviews Published"/>, #<img src="https://www.netgalley.com/badge/aa60c7e77cc330186f26ea1f647542df8af8326a" width="80" height="80" alt="Professional Reader" title="Professional Reader"/>, & I hope you enjoy it as much as I did .

I read this book on a recent holiday and was glad to have saved it for a time when I could spend a long time reading as it needs to be given concentration and attention.It’s a wonderful book ,full of detailed descriptions of places around the world ,with so many believable characters ,spanning almost 100 years.
It tells two stories ,mainly the story of Marian Graves, whose passion in life is flying ,and who’s believed to have disappeared while trying to fly around the world from pole to pole in 1950.The second story is told by Hadley Baxter ,an actor who is playing the part of Marian in a film about her life.
I loved the character of Marian ,whose life takes so many unexpected turns as she fights to be accepted as a pilot.Her twin brother,Jamie is also a wonderfully written character and I was just as interested in his life as I was in hers.
I was less interested in the sections about the making of the film,but came to realise why they were necessary.
I can imagine this making a great film in reality.
Just fabulous-I’ve told all my book loving friends to read it at once.
Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC in return for an honest review which reflects my own opinion.

In 1914 Marian Graves & her twin Jamie were rescued from a sinking ship & sent to live with their artist uncle in Missoula, Montana. He is an artist & a drunk & the twins more or less bring themselves up. Jamie is a dreamer & Marian is a whizz at anything mechanical. When she sees the barnstorming pilots the urge to fly is born. It is an obsession that will dominate her life leading her to attempt a circumnavigation of the world pole to pole.

A hundred years later a film is about to be made about Marian's disappearance. Hadley Baxter is cast as Marian & the role makes her try to find out more about the real woman & not just the legend.

This is a long book that I have dipped in & out of for months & eventually finished. I enjoyed Marian's story but found Hadley's contribution to the overall narrative an irritation & something I could have done without. I did enjoy Marian's story though.

Thanks to Netgalley & publisher for letting me read & review this book. I'm glad I did persevere till the end!

It’s not often that I’m prepared to identify a novel as being a personal ‘Book of the Year’ contender in July but I think I might make an exception for Great Circle, Maggie Shipstead’s epic novel.

For the last four weeks I have been utterly immersed in the life and times of pioneering aviatrix Marian Graves, following her from the fateful night in which her father – ship’s captain Addison Graves – opts to rescue Marian and her brother Jamie from the chilly waters of the Atlantic (and becomes a pariah in the process) to the equally fateful moment when a ‘sharp gannet plunge’ deep into the sea appears to mark the end of her effort to circumnavigate the globe from pole to pole.

Describing a book as dense and layered as Great Circle – which clocks in at 673 pages in its UK paperback form – is challenging, especially without giving spoilers. On the surface, this is a novel about a woman who wants to circumnavigate the globe and is presumed to have died trying. Marian’s fateful flight, however, doesn’t even begin until page 577. So, if this isn’t actually a novel about a woman flying a ‘great circle’, what is it?

The answer to that question is that Great Circle was, for me at least, many things.

In one sense, it really is a novel about a woman who wants to complete a ‘great circle’ around the globe. Marian’s fateful flight is the link holding the dual timelines of the novel together: the one thing that connects Marian to Hadley Baxter, the scandal-ridden starlet whose path to Hollywood redemption might be through playing Marian in a new biopic. In another sense, however, the novel is about circles more generally: specifically, the interconnecting circles of family, friends, lovers, histories, dreams, and possibilities that make up and intersect with a single life.

In an effort to understand Marian’s ‘great circle’, the reader must first meet her father and mother, and must understand their relationship to her father’s employer. We follow her brother Jamie, her childhood friend Caleb, and her uncle, Wallace. We see how Marian’s involvement with a bootlegger, Barclay Macqueen, has far-reaching consequences and how, like the planes she obsesses over, Marian’s life both soars and dives: into (and out of) marriage, into war, and, finally, into the unknown.

If all of that sounds baggy and voluminous, that’s because it is. But, for all its diversions and digressions, I don’t think one page of Great Circle is wasted. Indeed, as the novel progressed, I became wholly invested in the various layers and strands of the novel, and increasingly in awe of Shipstead’s ability to casually drop minor plot point or character from several hundred pages earlier back into the plot and blithely continue with the novel. By the time I reached the end of the book – and all the various dots had been connected – I felt as if I’d watched a quilt being made, each tiny scrap being gradually joined together until a finished object of immense beauty and togetherness emerged.

I’m aware that I’m gushing but I really did adore this novel. That said, I’m not saying it’s for everyone: some readers probably will find it too baggy or overly melodramatic. Others, I imagine, will find the frequent skipping of time, place, and narrator to be incoherent and disjointed. Still more might wonder what the point of Hadley’s narrative is. Certainly in the hands of a less competent writer, the sheer scope and scale of the novel has the potential to get dangerously out of hand.

For me, however, Shipstead has successfully combined a complex and ambitious narrative with vivid storytelling, memorable characters, and electric prose that leaps off the page. An epic in every sense of the word, I think I can say with confidence that Great Circle will be making an appearance on my Best Books of the Year list at the end of 2022.

Covering huge swathes of time and distance, Great Circle is epic in every sense of the word. Brilliantly interwoven stories and characters who remain in your heart long after the final page has been turned. Superb

I tried a few times to read this book, but the content was not for me. I was confused about the focus of the narrative and the size of the volume did not help.
The book has been praised publicly in many forums and I think those reviews might provide a better understanding of what the book was about

DNF - I intially had problems with this file - I know there was a route map at the beginning but it didn’t load at all for me. Nor did the text load until I scrolled through a chunk of the book.

Instead I got a copy from the library when it was released and tried reading it again. I don't think this book was for me - I just couldn't get into it and wasn't interested enough to want to finish it.

Thank you for the opportunity to read this book.

Set in both the early 20th century and the present day, Great Circle, is a wonderful beast of a book that combines great storytelling with subtle insight. It tells the story of two women, an actress and an aviator, whose parallel lives make for compelling reading.
The bulk of the book concerns the life of Marian Graves, an American woman born in 1914 who is raised with her brother by her uncle. Marian develops a fascination with flight at an early age and overcomes many obstacles to become a pilot. Her career culminates in an attempt to circumnavigate the globe during which she disappears.
The smaller part of the story is about Hadley Baxter, a young actress who has found worldwide fame in a successful franchise and now wants a meatier role. Hadley is hired to play Marian in a film about her life and disappearance.
With a plot spanning over a century and multiple locations around the globe, Great Circle, has a grand feeling. It’s a big book in page count, scope and themes. First and foremost, Maggie Shipstead is an excellent storyteller. The book is completely gripping throughout, packed with incident and emotion and with characters the reader really cares about. Both Marian and Hadley make great heroines: determined and brave, but also convincingly fragile and fallible. Around are a cast of lesser characters who are just as believable and enjoyable to read. Bootleggers, pilots, prisoners of war, movie stars, sea captains. It’s a book rich with life and diversity.
That diversity allows Shipstead to cover a range of themes, all centered on the struggles of minority groups, in particular women. Much of this book is about the abuse of power by those who have it, and also about how the oppressed or disadvantaged manage to fight back. It’s a rousing read - a great story, populated with great characters and full of humanity. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

I completely understand why people are in raptures over this novel - big, punchy historical sagas sing to an audience. Except me. I tried. There were bits I liked (especially the ending). As is often the issue with sagas, so much happens. Most people lead ordinary lives, with one or two remarkable events, if that. The characters in Great Circle are bombarded - all of them, at every stage of life - and it stretched plausibility. Do stories need to plausible? No, of course not, but I can get distracted when they aren't, and it's why I don't become fully absorbed in a book like Great Circle.

This was a fantastic read, weaving together the story of two different women. One was an aviator who went missing in the 1950s and one is an actress playing the aviator in a film of her life in the current day. I couldn't put it down.

Nominated for the 2021 Booker Prize, this is one of these long American novels which people talk about as epic and sprawling when they aren’t quite sure if they like it! It goes without saying that it also covers and frames a huge span of time and a wide geographical area festooned with characters who all have their own back stories. It’s all very American!

The book is about a fictional aviator called Marion Graves and a 1950 attempt to circumnavigate the poles in an old Dakota but it covers her entire life as well as the life of her twin brother, the death of her parents, her involvement with a rich bootlegger and umpteen relationships. After Prohibition, we get World War II and flying fighters around the United Kingdom before she disappears, or does she, on this final trip around the world.

In a way, this is only half the story because Marion’s story is interlinked with that of a contemporary film starlet so there is a lot of Hollywood and stuff until eventually the two stories are joined together, albeit in a rather fanciful way.

What’s it about? It has a lot to say about relationships between men and women in terms of sex, fragility and power. Marion is a kind of empowering figure of a woman but she is constantly bankrolled by other people especially the bootlegger who pursues her. She has a twin brother, Jamie, who is a kind of counterpoint to her story but both are somehow at the mercy of events rather than making their own destiny. That’s weird in this kind of saga.

The diversions mostly work but, sometimes, you feel you’re getting lost in Wikipedia. I found the stuff about the Second World War and Marion flying for the women’s auxiliary RAF in the UK not exactly convincing with details I’ve come across in other documentary sources sort of recycled. There’s also a long diversion about Alaska past and present which seems a bit loaded.

Having said all that, it’s a readable book. Maggie Shipstead has a nice style and spots details which perhaps her characters wouldn’t. Generally, she evokes places rather well. The Californian bits don’t really work. It’s a big jump to imagine this spoiled teenage star becoming so involved with Marion’s history and the ending is also a big jump without giving too much away.

There’s a good book in there somewhere, maybe about early aviation or women forging new pathways and although this book doesn’t lose its way and is carefully managed in terms of telling us how many months or years have passed since the last chapter it didn’t quite hold together for me.

Slow slow slow is how this book is, quite a nice story but it goes on forever. Marian Graves begins her life after surviving a shipwreck with her twin brother and Father, her Father the captain of the ship is sent to prison and Marian and her brother live with her wayward artist uncle.

I could not finish this book I found it very disjointed and I was so looking forward to reading it but just could not finish it.

I really wanted to love Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead. But somehow I couldn't quite get there. It is a hugely ambitious book, spanning decades and various fascinating lives. I love an epic novel. But reading this I often found myself longing for more intimacy with the characters - not of the sexual kind, there is more than enough of that here. The characters seemed harried to me, yanked from one dramatic event to the next. There is so much crammed into the story that I felt the personalities didn't have time to breathe, to find their depth. A lot of the scenes teased my emotions, but also left me yearning for more. I also did not really see the point of the Hollywood story. This is not to say that I did enjoy and admire certain parts of the book: Marian's relationship with Barclay is so problematic and abusive, yet so well developed. Jamie's life is fascinating, maybe he should have had his own book. The description of the actual great circle, the flight is amazing, and also could have stood as it's own book. The end is clever and satisfying, even if a little drawn out. The writing is lush and masterfully crafted. This is a book that has frustrated me quite a bit, but that has provoked a lot of good chats with friends and family, and that seems to be lingering (I read it a couple of weeks ago and it is still ruminating in me).

CW: child abuse, groomimg, sexual abuse, violence

This book covers the life of Marion, rescued as a baby off a sinking ship, to her role in WW2 and then to her attempt to circumnavigate the world by air over the poles. The characters fell a bit flat for me and I am getting a bit tired of faux-histories in the vein of Taylor Jenkins Reid - they just feel so derivative.

This is an interesting read, told in a dual time narrative and also as a journal at points.

Marian Graves is a twin, brought up with her brother Jamie by their uncle Wallace when their father, a ship's captain, is sent to prison after abandoning his ship following an explosion at sea. She is solitary and driven, knowing from a young age that she wants to fly after seeing two pilots - barnstormers - when they visit the part of Montana she is living in.

Marian achieves her dream, but at a cost, which continues to haunt her as the years pass. She disappears in early 1950 on the final leg of a circumnavigation flight and is presumed drowned. Her journal is found later and a book emerges that eventually turns into a film.

Hadley Baxter is the actress cast as Marian in the film of Marian's life and final flight. She has a celebrity status due to starring in a fantasy film franchise and is inclined to be a little too honest. Making the film changes her perspective and the way she views relationships, as she becomes increasingly drawn to Marian's story.

I enjoyed this book, particularly the sections that were about Marian and Jamie, whilst Hadley took a little longer to warm to. She seemed self-obsessed and a little needy at times but grew as a person towards the end of the story when she found out the truth about Marian.

Maggie Shipstead has clearly done her research and Marian's complex character is well conveyed. I liked the ending, although it was puzzling how Marian would have claimed royalties on a book about her if she was supposed to be dead, although I guess that has something to do with Caleb, the childhood friend who remained loyal to her and Jamie throughout.

I was sent an advance review copy of this book by Random House UK, Transworld Publishers, in return for an honest appraisal.

This novel is epic on scope - it felt like a great sweep of a life, so thrilling and engaging and so well-drawn. I found the novel brilliant, imaginative and evocative.

Great historical fiction. I did have to check if these people existed as it read so well. A fascinating story set in 1950 and today. A long but epic saga spanning the world.