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A Missoula Must-Read

Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

Reading has always been a euphoric sweet spot somewhere between getting away and finding myself. I love the way writing can transport me to a different place or era and also encourage self-reflection through character development. That's why Great Circle is my summer pick. Maggie Shipstead has a clever writing style and superb characters. And Marian, one of the main characters, grew up in Montana! Nothing like a little local flavor on the ol' reading list. This story will inspire even the cuddliest of homebodies to pursue a summer adventure. 

Great Circle tells the story of a daredevil 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 14, 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.

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