Today’s GalleyCrush is Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle, forthcoming from Knopf on May 4, 2021.
Perfect pitch: “Spanning Prohibition-era Montana, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, New Zealand, wartime London, and modern-day Los Angeles, Great Circle tells the unforgettable story of a daredevil female aviator determined to chart her own course in life, at any cost.”
First line: “If you were to put a blade through any sphere and divide it into two perfect halves, the circumference of the cut side of each half would be a great circle: that is, the largest circle that can be drawn on a sphere.”
Book notes: Hardcover, fiction, 608 pages.
Cover credit: Art by Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson. Photo © Peter Nahum at the Leicester Galleries, London / Bridgeman Images. Jacket design by Kelly Blair.
Author bio: Maggie Shipstead is the New York Times best-selling author of the novels Astonish Me and Seating Arrangements, which won the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction. She is a graduate of Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
