In an attempt to unravel the mystery surrounding her life, almost 90 years later Hollywood superstar Hadley Baxter is cast to play Marian in a biographical exploration of her life. But, as history tells, she did not succeed in her circumnavigation attempt, crashing somewhere over the Antarctic and disappearing without a trace. Great Circle follows the life of Marian Graves, the ground-breaking female aviator who stopped at nothing to achieve her dream of flying around the world in a Great Circle, the greatest circle possible, crossing over both the north and south poles.
It’s a book about female strength, resilience and power, and if you’re ready to feel excited, gutted, anxious, elated and more in under 600 pages, this one is for you. During World War II, she becomes the Brooklyn Naval Yard's first female diver.A stunning feat of historical fiction that spans decades and lifetimes in detail like you’ve never read before. When she is a child, Anna Kerrigan's father disappears at the hands of gangsters. If you like this, read: Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan (Little, Brown, 2017, $18.95, available here), another historical novel with a formidable heroine that does with water what Great Circle does with air. It is against the odds that this novel should get off the ground. She declares: "I wish to measure my life against the dimensions of the planet." Marian observes that her intentions are unachievable, but these may be the worthiest kind. It seeks to test how infinite space might be compacted into art, the complexities of a life compressed into a legacy. It wants to highlight the forgotten women of flight history. Like its heroines, Great Circle's ambitions have enormous scope. There is Amy Johnson, the first woman to fly solo from London to Australia Elinor Smith, who flew under four New York City bridges on a dare and Jacqueline Cochran, the speed queen who broke the sound barrier.Īmelia Earhart, the most famous aviatrix of all time, is a background presence, viewed with a tinge of resentment for being the only one posterity had room for. This is matched by a sweeping volume of research, glimpsed in detours into the science of navigation the story of a gender-fluid indigenous warrior dubbed Sitting-in-the-Water-Grizzly and the real-life women pilots whose stories speckle the landscape of Marian's.
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