May
14
1:30am
Skylit: Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead, with Sarah Ramos
By Skylight Books
Great Circle (Knopf)
Spanning Prohibition-era Montana, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, New Zealand, wartime London, and modern-day Los Angeles, Great Circle tells the unforgettable story of a daredevil female aviator determined to chart her own course in life, at any cost.
After being rescued as infants from a sinking ocean liner in 1914, Marian and Jamie Graves are raised by their dissolute uncle in Missoula, Montana. There--after encountering a pair of barnstorming pilots passing through town in beat-up biplanes--Marian commences her lifelong love affair with flight. At fourteen she drops out of school and finds an unexpected and dangerous patron in a wealthy bootlegger who provides a plane and subsidizes her lessons, an arrangement that will haunt her for the rest of her life, even as it allows her to fulfill her destiny: circumnavigating the globe by flying over the North and South Poles.
A century later, Hadley Baxter is cast to play Marian in a film that centers on Marian's disappearance in Antarctica. Vibrant, canny, disgusted with the claustrophobia of Hollywood, Hadley is eager to redefine herself after a romantic film franchise has imprisoned her in the grip of cult celebrity. Her immersion into the character of Marian unfolds, thrillingly, alongside Marian's own story, as the two women's fates--and their hunger for self-determination in vastly different geographies and times--collide. Epic and emotional, meticulously researched and gloriously told, Great Circle is a monumental work of art, and a tremendous leap forward for the prodigiously gifted Maggie Shipstead.
Maggie Shipstead is the New York Times-bestselling author of the novels Great Circle, Astonish Me, and Seating Arrangements, which won the Dylan Thomas Prize and the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction. She is a graduate of Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. A frequent contributor to travel magazines, she is often away from her home in Los Angeles.
Sarah Ramos is a filmmaker, writer and actor. She starred as Haddie Braverman on the NBC family drama series Parenthood and more recently emerged on Instagram feeds with her DIY re-enactments of cult-favourite movie/TV scenes and pop culture moments (“Quarantscenes”). She starred in and directed the 2017 web series City Girl, which she also starred in at age 25 after writing the script at 12. Her latest projects include creating the Autograph Hound zine in collaboration with THNK1994 Museum, directing an episode of Marvel 616, and producing and co-hosting The Renner Files podcast.
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