Great Circle

Full stop.

Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead.

Just unbeatable.

Just an absolute epic if you are looking for an incredibly genius escapist.

Then to a waiting world came news of disaster as the plane failed to reach tiny Howland Island in the Pacific.

Well, Maggie, Maggie Shipstead is the author of the novel Great Circle about a vanished female aviator, and she's been telling the BBC's Justin Webb how likely it might be that this new expedition will find out what really happened to Amelia Earhart.

My strong opinion is that it's overwhelmingly likely that she ran out of fuel, crashed into the ocean, and the airplane sank.

Um, so I don't think they're going to find anything at, um, Nikumaroro.

So this deep dive is an exploration of five distinct novels.

We've got Lessons in Chemistry, Great Circle, 11/22/63, A Gentleman in Moscow, and Where the Crawdads Sing.

These are the ingredients keeping a master storyteller inspired.

And the thesis we're really gonna explore today is that these five books, while, um, while they're sprawling across drastically different genres and eras and environments, they are not strangers to one another.

Right.

What happens when a woman decides that the ground itself is just too small? We move from the claustrophobia of a television studio to the sweeping, terrifying expanse of the sky.

Let's examine the mechanics of scale in Great Circle.

If Lessons in Chemistry is a masterclass in the micro, Great Circle is an exercise in the macro.