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Epic-books

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Long books that are worth every minute of reading

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What book to read, based on your favourite Christmas song

The soaring and emotional novel shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2022 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2021

Great Circle

Luminous, masterful ... glides seamlessly through the 20th century immersing the reader. Tremendously well-written

A gripping historical adventure that feels sharp, fresh and modern

Shipstead turns phrases and observes people beautifully. Full of adventure, passion and tragedy... a glorious tribute to women who push the boundaries of their one, brief life, breaking the bonds of their place in history and their female bodies, to soar higher and faster than others; and the price they pay to live so fast                                

What's so impressive is how deeply we care about each of these people, and how the shape and texture of each of their stories collide to build a story all its own. GREAT CIRCLE grasps for and ultimately reaches something extraordinary

The Marian portions rove from Montana to Manhattan to Scotland and Antarctica, and read like a carnival of early-20th-century American history, packed with bootleggers, treacherous boxcar rides, and tragic shipwrecks. The Hadley chapters offer a delectable dissection of life as a celebrity, serving up an intelligent skewering of the Hollywood machine and allowing the book to take flight

GREAT CIRCLE is a novel of our insatiable need to stare down the terrible, magnificent vastness of it all: love, war, desire, fear ... A sweeping, swashbuckling book, full of oversaturated colour and grand destiny. The joy of this dynamic, soaring novel is not a welcome extra but its very engine

Encompasses flight, travel adventure, identity, sexuality, family, the celebrity age - and in such beautiful writing. A masterpiece.

Rocked by the cool cadences of Shipstead's prose, readers will embark on a journey through time and space. Across 600 pages, they'll link arms with its characters as they stroll along the decks of early-1900s ocean liners, then board private jets to eavesdrop on the poolside parties of 21st-century Hollywood. They'll spot eagles arcing over the wild frontiers of Prohibition-era America then feel the lonely, existential chill of the white expanses of Antarctica - in between city breaks in Europe and Australia

This wonderful novel weaves together the story of two women: a female aviator who goes missing in the1950s and the Hollywood star playing her in a film in the present day. A commitment that rewards with memorable characters and vivid storytelling

GOOD HOUSEKEEPING, 'Best Fiction of 2021'

From near-death experience in childhood, to marriage to a bootlegger, Marian rockets off the page in this gripping novel. A staggering story

Accomplished and ambitious... Most novelists have their limits and cut their cloth accordingly. Shipstead is a writer who can vividly summon whatever she chooses, taking the reader deep inside the world she creates.

A clever, poignant story about ambition, love and sacrifice that'll completely draw you in

This ambitious, wide-ranging and psychologically insightful novel is a tour-de-force

It is rare to read a novel that is as beautifully built as it is elegantly written. Moving and surprising at every turn

A gorgeous soaring story that takes flight from the very first page

A riveting novel with powerful characters that will excite, shock and enthral

A work of epic proportions and rich, cinematic detail

Grand, audacious and completely engrossing

This epic novel tops 600 pages but you'll still want more.  Ambitious, cannily constructed and entertaining

Beautifully written and endlessly readable, this rapturous novel soars

Ambitious, intricately detailed, rich and considered

Daringly ambitious... a novel that invites the reader to immerse themselves in the sweep of history, the rich and detailed research... breathtaking

Great Circle is an epic trip-through Prohibition and World War II, from Montana to London to present-day Hollywood-and you'll relish every minute

Glitz and guts square off in Great Circle: a tale of two women set apart by a century, fighting to retain control of their own lives in a society that demands subservience. Shipstead is adept at writing so vividly, the reader can feel the thrill and pain of her characters. Cunningly crafted. . . richly layered, a joy to read . . . riveting

An enthralling epic about aviation and adventure. A big, baggy blast of a book bulging with sex and drugs, taking in Prohibition-era Montana, wartime London, present-day Hollywood, painting and physics. I loved it

A soaring epic of female adventure and wanderlust

Bestselling novelist Maggie Shipstead was struggling to depict a female adventurer. So she became one.  The stakes of GREAT CIRCLE are high-for its heroine, literally life or death. Though Shipstead never learned to fly herself, she aligned with her main character Marian Graves in more important ways . . . She is interested in testing her limits

Relentlessly exciting . . . My top recommendation for this summer. Shipstead's sweeping new female-centered epic intertwines the story of Marian, an aviator who wants to circumnavigate the globe with that of actor Hadley Baxter, cast a century later to play Marian in a film. What can Marian's life tell Hadley about her own?

Dazzling prose in the service of an expansive story that covers more than a century and seems to encapsulate the whole wide world. With detailed brilliance, she lavishes heart and empathy on every character. She never wavers, pulls out a twist or two that feel fully earned, and then sticks the landing

Swinging from one century to the next, from the moneyed splendor of cities to the shifting Antarctic ice, Shipstead's prose overflows with meticulous detail

Enthralling. Moving and surprising at every turn

Sweepingly panoramic and immersive. An audacious epic

In a moment when our quarantined worlds have become so small, GREAT CIRCLE offers more than just wanderlust; it feels like a liberation.

Maggie Shipstead combines cinematic scope with a poet's eye for detail

The beginning of Maggie Shipstead's astounding novel, a Booker finalist, includes a series of endings: two plane crashes, a sunken ship and several people dead. The bad luck continues when one of the ship's young survivors, Marian, grows up to become a pilot-only to disappear on the job. Shipstead unravels parallel narratives, Marian's and that of another woman whose life is changed by Marian's story, in glorious detail. Every character, whether mentioned once or 50 times, has a specific, necessary presence. It's a narrative made to be devoured, one that is both timeless and satisfying.

GREAT CIRCLE flew us to a different world. A book to devour

A sweeping saga that alternates between the life of a tenacious female aviator in the 1930s and that of a millennial film star cast to play her in a biopic. In death, 'each of us destroys the world,' the author observes - but her engrossing novel is a moving reflection on the will to survive

Artfully constructed and exhuberantly entertaining

Shipstead soars in this expansive, beautiful novel about women and flight

Engrossing, ambitious, beautifully written

Completely engrossing from the very first page. You won't be able to put this down

A brilliant saga of a book. It will absolutely captivate you

MAGGIE SHIPSTEAD is the author of the New York Times bestselling novels SEATING ARRANGEMENTS - winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize and L A Times Book Prize for First Fiction - ASTONISH ME and the Booker-shortlisted GREAT CIRCLE. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Guardian, Conde Nast Traveller, The Best American Short Stories and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. YOU HAVE A FRIEND IN 10A is her first story collection. Maggie Shipstead grew up in California and lives in Los Angeles, California.

THE SENSATIONAL NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 
Amazon Book of the Year 
Time Magazine Book of the Year 
Waterstones fiction Book of the Month 
______________ 
 
'A GRIPPING HISTORICAL ADVENTURE' STYLIST 
 
'SO BEAUTIFUL, SO DARING, SO COMPLETE' TAYLOR JENKINS REID 
 
'A MASTERPIECE' NIGELLA LAWSON 
 
EXTRAORDINARY' NEW YORK TIMES 
 
'WONDERFUL' GOOD HOUSEKEEPING MAGAZINE 
_______________________ 
 
A soaring, breathtakingly ambitious novel that weaves together the astonishing lives of a 1950s vanished female aviator and the modern-day Hollywood actress who plays her on screen. 
 
Marian Graves is driven by a need for freedom and danger. From her days as a wild child in prohibition America to the blitz and glitz of wartime London, she is determined to live an independent life. 
 
But it is an obsession with flight that consumes her most. 
 
Having become one of the most fearless pilots in her time, she sets out to do what no one has done before: to circumnavigate the globe from pole to pole. 
 
But shortly before completing the journey, her plane disappears, lost to history. 
 
Over half a century later, troubled film star Hadley Baxter is offered to play Marian in the comeback role of a lifetime. From the first pages of the script, Hadley is drawn inexorably to the female pilot. 
 
It is a role that will lead her to an unexpected discovery, throwing fresh and spellbinding light on the story of the unknowable Marian Graves. 
 
_______________________ 
 
WATERSTONES FICTION BOOK OF THE MONTH JUNE 2022 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2022 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2021 
A ROYAL READING ROOM PICK 2023 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE HWA GOLD CROWN 2022 
TIME MAGAZINE BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021 
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER MAY 2021 
TIMES BESTSELLER JUNE 2022 
_______________________ 
 
'Full of adventure, passion and tragedy' THE TIMES 
 
'Soars from the very first page' SUNDAY EXPRESS 
 
'Luminous, masterful. Glides seamlessly through the 20th century' TELEGRAPH, Best Fiction of 2021 
 
'Breathtaking' OBSERVER 
 
'Truly exceptional storytelling, combining a sweeping arc of history with writing that, at sentence level, is near-flawless.' THE BOOKSELLER 
 
'A tour-de-force' DAILY EXPRESS 
 
'Impressive and gripping' SUNDAY TIMES 
 
'Surprising and moving at every turn' GUARDIAN 
 
'Audacious and Immersive' DAILY MAIL 
 
'Accomplished and ambitious' FINANCIAL TIMES 
 
Readers love GREAT CIRCLE: 
***** What a read! Immense story with beautifully created characters 
***** The story is so well researched and planned; historical fiction standing side by side with history itself 
***** This is a stunning achievement, my perspective feels fundamentally transformed through reading it 
***** A wonderful saga, covering a large chunk of the twentieth century

Maggie Shipstead

The same chilling brilliance of Daphne du Maurier's most unsettling short fiction

It's a rare writer who can create a world as convincingly over a few pages as in a 600-page novel; Shipstead's fluency in both forms is testament to the skill she modestly casts as a work in progress

Has an innate charm of its own. Beautifully realised

Shipstead's prose is lovely. Precise, vivid, vital

Reaching across decades and set in a diverse array of locations both domestic and exotic, Shipstead's latest will find a home on bookshelves beside the works of Andre Dubus, Jane Smiley and Richard Russo

Accomplished. It's the glimpse of a writer honing her craft that is most satisfying

For GREAT CIRCLE: So beautiful, so daring, so complete

Shipstead displays luminous, exacting language as she demonstrates her flair for creating distinctive characters

Shipstead digs deep in to her characters' lives and paints a vivid picture in beautifully rendered, sparse prose. What a talent!

By the 2022 Women’s Fiction Prize and 2021 Booker Prize shortlisted author of GREAT CIRCLE

BY THE AUTHOR OF THE 2021 BOOKER PRIZE-SHORTLISTED AND 2022 WOMEN'S FICTION PRIZE-SHORTLISTED GREAT CIRCLE 
 
'The same chilling brilliance of Daphne du Maurier's most unsettling short fiction' FINANCIAL TIMES 
 
'Has an innate charm of its own. Beautifully realised' DAILY MAIL 
 
'It's a rare writer who can create a world as convincingly over a few pages as in a 600-page novel; Shipstead's fluency in both forms is testament to the skill she modestly casts as a work in progress' Stephanie Merritt, GUARDIAN 
 
'Maggie Shipstead combines cinematic scope with a poet's attention to detail' THE TIMES 
 
A collection of sparkling award-winning stories from Maggie Shipstead, epic storyteller and astonishing chronicler of the daring and the damaged. Diving into eclectic and vivid settings, from an Olympic village to a deathbed in Paris to a Pacific atoll, and illuminating a cast of unforgettable characters, Shipstead traverses the ordinary and extraordinary with cunning, compassion, and wit. 
 
Meet the silent cowgirl and horse wrangler escaping an ugly home life, only to fall into a decade-long triangle of unrequited love; a male novelist who is just reckoning with his own pretentiousness as his debut novel goes to print; a honeymoon couple's time in the hills of Romania builds into a moment of shattering tragedy. In the title story, a famous child actress breaks away from a religious cult, as she tells - with brittle candour - her tale of childhood damage and the dark side of fame. 
 
Exuding both tenderness and bite, Shipstead exposes complicated truths in this dazzling collection sealing her reputation as an astonishingly versatile master of fiction. 
--------------------- 
'Shipstead is a writer who can vividly summon whatever she chooses, taking the reader deep inside the world she creates' FINANCIAL TIMES 
 
'Shipstead observes people beautifully' THE TIMES

Maggie Shipstead

Praise for You have a friend in 10A

The same chilling brilliance of Daphne du Maurier's most unsettling short fiction

It's a rare writer who can create a world as convincingly over a few pages as in a 600-page novel; Shipstead's fluency in both forms is testament to the skill she modestly casts as a work in progress

Shipstead observes people beautifully

The same chilling brilliance of Daphne du Maurier's most unsettling short fiction

It's a rare writer who can create a world as convincingly over a few pages as in a 600-page novel; Shipstead's fluency in both forms is testament to the skill she modestly casts as a work in progress

Shipstead observes people beautifully

The same chilling brilliance of Daphne du Maurier's most unsettling short fiction

It's a rare writer who can create a world as convincingly over a few pages as in a 600-page novel; Shipstead's fluency in both forms is testament to the skill she modestly casts as a work in progress

Shipstead observes people beautifully

Books by Maggie Shipstead

Articles featuring Maggie Shipstead

Long books that are worth every minute of reading

What book to read, based on your favourite Christmas song

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