But the connections between the narratives feels organic here. Shipstead’s use of the parallel narratives is a device common in Young Adult Fiction where it sometimes feels contrived. He returns from prison to spend the night with his brother, Wallace, who has been doing his best to raise the twins, but Addison is gone the next morning before ever introducing himself to the children. His release from prison is another significant disappearance in a book that is filled with disappearances and absences. He is subsequently sentenced to nine years in prison, and never recovers from the reputational loss of being thought a coward. As the captain of the ship, Addison Graves has little choice but to climb aboard a life raft with his two infant children when he cannot find his wife.

Marian’s mother, Annabel, who it is obvious to the reader suffers post-natal depression, simply disappears the night the ship sinks, while Marian’s father’s loss to Marian and her twin brother, Jamie, is slower and crueller. Hadley, who lost her own parents to a plane crash when she was only a child, feels a connection to Marian’s tragedy – not her disappearance but the loss of Marian’s parents to the sinking of the Josephina Eterna during World War I. It is no spoiler to speak of Eddie and Marian’s disappearance, since these details are revealed in the opening pages of the novel.įor Hadley Baxter, Marian is enigmatic – lost to time – and compelling. It will be published and receive some modest attention, and later it will inspire a novel, Wings of Peregrine, upon which the movie will be based. They disappear somewhere near the Ross Ice Shelf, where Marian’s journal will later be discovered, wrapped in a life jacket. But Marian and her navigator, Eddie Bloom, never make it back. In Marian’s case, her flight begins in Auckland New Zealand, is planned to head north and across the Arctic Circle, and then south again to eventually traverse the Antarctic continent, before returning to New Zealand. In flying parlance, a great circle is a circumnavigation of the globe following the shortest route possible. Maggie Shipstead’s third novel, Great Circle, is primarily the story of Marian Graves, who begins her career as a pilot in the 1930s, flying for a booktlegger, Barlcay Macqueen, and the story of Hadley Baxter, a contemporary actress who is about to play Marian in a new biopic, Peregrine, which focuses on Marian’s attempt to fly her C-47 Dakota in a great circle around the world.

The great circle book