SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2022 SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2021 THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER TIME MAGAZINE BOOK OF THE YEAR 'A gripping historical adventure that feels sharp, fresh and modern' STYLIST 'So beautiful, so ...

When we started our conversation about Great Circle, everyone agreed that it was an enjoyable read. It's often that the books we pick at NUBClub are challenging or heavy or obtuse, and it was a refreshing change of pace to read something that just flowed forward with style and power while still telling a meaty story. A lot of our discussion was unpacking why Shipstead chose to write so much about both characters. Marian, the pilot in the past, was the clear central character and everyone found her story about her struggles with her found family and her oppressive marriage interesting. We were passionate about our takes on her wartime efforts and in particular her relationship with her long time lover Caleb. We all found Marian to be a troubling but compelling character that we liked discussing and following as she pushed against the boundaries of her misogynist world and defied the expectations of everyone around her. The modern character Hadley was a more controversial character for us -- about half of us liked her narrative of stardom and self-destructive rebellion while others felt it was unnecessary to the story and not sympathetic. However, the more we interrogated these two stories, the more connections we found, particularly around the way both women were trapped in other people's expectations of them and deeply thinking about who had the ability to tell their stories. The central mystery of the story -- what happened to Marian in her world circling flight -- ultimately comes down to what version of her story will win out and the novel asks interesting questions how much control people (and particularly women) have over their lives and the meaning of them. This also gave us a way to incorporate the stories of the secondary characters -- Marian's navigator who comes to his own terms of his experience of being gay in Marian's time, and the gorgeous passages about Marian's righteous moral brother James. We all found James's story touching and powerful, and the metaphor of his drawing of the battles of World War 2 -- rendered as unreadable scribbles when he thought he was making accurate depictions -- became a central symbol of the question of how we understand the past and what true representations of past heroes can possibly be. The more we talked about the book, the more interesting content surfaced around these questions, and by the end of our conversation, we were amazed at the elegance with which Shipstead put it all together. It's a really remarkable book. As a beach read, it's light, engaging, and emotionally moving in beautiful ways, but if you want to go deep with it, there's structure and theme galore to unpack. We tip our hat to you, Maggie Shipstead. Brava.