It was on a trip to New Zealand that the idea for this book first arrived: at Auckland airport she saw a statue of Jean Batten, whose epic flights in the 1930s – she was the first person to fly solo from London to New Zealand – made history, though her name is now largely forgotten. Her debut, Seating Arrangements, won the Dylan Thomas prize in 2012 she is also a travel writer whose journeys have taken her to both the Arctic and the Antarctic. It’s no spoiler to reveal her fate, for her disappearance, described in the novel’s first pages, is the spark of Shipstead’s third novel. She and her navigator, Eddie Bloom, vanished somewhere over the Ross ice shelf, on the very last leg of their journey, heading up towards New Zealand. By that time she was, as the reader will learn, an accomplished aviator, a woman obsessed with flight since her girlhood in the wilds of Montana. In this enthralling novel, Graves disappeared in 1950 while attempting to fly around the world – longitudinally, passing over both north and south poles. With the fictional Marian Graves, Maggie Shipstead creates a compelling, original heroine all her own. T he early history of aviation is full of courageous, fascinating women: Amy Johnson and Amelia Earhart are probably the best known.
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