Great Circle

Marian Graves grows up wild in Prohibition-era America and wants one thing above all: freedom, with a measure of danger. She turns away from her childhood sweetheart and moves through a series of glamorous lovers, but flying is the obsession that takes hold of her completely.

Her life carries her from wartime London in the Blitz to the rough coast of New Zealand and finally to an ice shelf in Antarctica. Her last ambition is to fly around the globe from pole to pole. That attempt ends in a crash landing in a hostile expanse of ice.

More than fifty years later, a second story begins. Hadley Baxter, a film star whose life is in disarray, is drawn to the part of Marian in a movie about the pilot. Preparing for the role leads her to a discovery that sheds new light on a woman nobody fully understood.

The book is a historical novel that moves between two eras and two women, one in the air and one on a film set. The question it turns on is what happened to Marian on the ice, and what Hadley finds out about her.