She begins Marian’s story before she is even born in 1914, introducing us not to a little girl but to a ship, the Josephina Eterna. Shipstead deftly interweaves Marian and Hadley’s lives and draws striking parallels between their experiences, despite the time and circumstances separating them.

It is Marian’s story that will allow Hadley to spread her own wings. When Hadley starts dating her co-star, Oliver, fans swoon: when she cheats on him in public she’s unceremoniously booted off the franchise. A former child star, Hadley shoots to stratospheric fame in a series of fantasy films called Archangel (think Twilight). The early sections of the novel, set in 2014, are wincingly hilarious. She finds herself powerfully, unexpectedly drawn to digging out the truth of Marian’s fate. Running in parallel to Marian’s story is a 21st-century narrative: that of Hadley Baxter, a Hollywood ingenue who is attempting to rescue her reputation by making a film about Marian. Yet Great Circle is more than a historical novel, and the book has more than one heroine. 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.

Great circle shipstead