Great Circle

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2021
Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2022

A soaring, ambitious novel that weaves together the lives of a vanished female aviator of the 1950s and the modern-day Hollywood actress who plays her on screen.

From the night she is rescued as a baby from a sinking ship, to the day she joins a pair of daredevil pilots looping over the forests of her Montana childhood, to the thrill of flying Spitfires during the war, the life of Marian Graves has always been marked by a hunger for freedom and danger. In 1950 she sets out on the great circle flight, circumnavigating the globe from pole to pole. It is her life’s dream and her final journey, before she disappears without a trace.

Half a century later, Hadley Baxter, a scandal-ridden Hollywood actress whose own parents died in a plane crash, is irresistibly drawn to play Marian – a role that will lead her to probe the true mystery behind the vanished pilot.