Published by DoubleDay / Knopf, 2021, 593 pages.

“I was born to be a wanderer. I was shaped to the earth like a seabird to a wave.”

In 1950, aviator Marian Graves undertook a round-the-world flight, going from north to south. She disappeared over Antarctica—neither her body nor the plane was ever found.

Over half a century later, a young actress, Hadley Baxter, is to play Marian in a Hollywood biopic.

This book follows the stories of the two women.

During the First World War, Marian Graves and her twin brother Jamie are travelling on a passenger ship when it is bombed. Their father rescues his young children by pushing his way onto a life boat. Because he is the captain of the ship, he is sent to prison for leaving the sinking ship instead of making sure all the passengers got off first.   

The twins are now alone, as their father is imprisoned and their mother has walked out on them. Marian and Jamie are raised by their uncle Wallace, an artist living in Montana. Wallace is not much of a surrogate father and lets the children run wild. One day, Marian goes up in a plane for the first time when barnstormers come to town, and she is bitten by the bug of flying. Desperate to earn money so she can take flying lessons, she makes deliveries for the local baker and bootlegger.

The men at the airfield do not take her seriously, until she is noticed by Barclay Macqueen, a gangster, who offers to pay for her flying lessons. She accepts his offer, but it is a poisoned chalice. Barclay is not being charitable (although he insists he just wants to help her): he is a man who is used to getting what he wants, and he wants Marian. They eventually marry, and Barclay tries to force Marian to have children, assuming that once she is a mother, she will forget about flying. But he underrates her: Marian will not be controlled by anyone—all she wants to do is fly.

The book follows Marian as she copes with her marriage, escapes to Alaska where she flies small planes delivering goods and people, then goes over to Britain during the Second World War to deliver fighter planes. After the war is over, she decides to make a final flight around the world, north to south.

In present-day Hollywood, Hadley Baxter, a scandal-plagued actress, has been given the role of Marian in a film. Hadley is fascinated by Marian—they both lost their parents (Hadley’s died when the small plane they were flying crashed into Lake Erie) and were raised by their uncles. But the more she tries to find out about Marian, the more mysteries she discovers.

The book moves back and forth between the two stories, bringing out the similarities between them. It starts with Marian’s disappearance and then goes to the beginning—not just of Marian’s story but that of her parents, who are both restless, unable to settle down.  

I loved Maggie Shipstead’s use of language. When Marian decides she wants to fly more than anything else in the world, Shipstead describes her as being “at an age when the future adult rattles the child’s bones like the bars of a cage”. When she first takes to the skies, she feels like she is “flying around the valley like a marble riding the inner surface of a bowl”.   

Shipstead describes the two worlds vividly—the worlds of flying and of Hollywood—in a way that feels authentic. When she writes about aviation, you can almost smell the engine oil and feel the excitement of being in the air. Hadley’s story captures the crazy existence of celebrities in our age of instant communication, social media and 24-hour news.

In Marian, she has created an unforgettable character: someone who is a loner, who is fiercely independent and strong. Shipstead has said that Marian is an amalgam of some of the real-life female aviators at the time, women whom she mentions throughout the book. I had no idea there were so many. 

This is an ambitious work that brings alive two very different milieus. Shipstead pulls you into the lives of these two women, both of whom try to navigate their often hostile worlds, worlds where society puts pressure on women to conform to a stereotype—something they both refuse to do.

If you are looking for a book you can lose yourself in, I would recommend this.