Events › East Boston Book Club: Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

Join your fellow readers for the East Boston Book Club’s discussion of Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead. Print copies will be available to check out at the front desk while supplies last, and the title is available as an 
e-audiobook and e-book through Libby.

About the book:

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 pilots passing through town—Marian commences her lifelong love affair with flight. At fourteen she drops out of school and finds an unexpected patron in a wealthy bootlegger who provides a plane and subsidizes her lessons, an arrangement that will haunt her, 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. 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.