In Conversation: On Libertie: A Novel & Great Circle: A Novel

Maggie Shipstead is the New York Times bestselling author of Astonish Me: A Novel and Seating Arrangements. Epic, emotional, and meticulously researched, her latest book, Great Circle: A Novel (Knopf), tells an epic story of two women 100 years apart. After being rescued as infants from a sinking ocean liner in 1914, Marian and Jamie Graves are raised by their dissolute uncle in Missoula, Montana. After encountering a pair of barnstorming pilots passing through town in beat-up biplanes, Marian commences her lifelong love affair with flight. At 14 she drops out of school and finds an unexpected and dangerous patron in a wealthy bootlegger. Their arrangement will haunt her for the rest of her life, but it allows her to circumnavigate the globe by flying over the North and South Poles. A century later, Hadley Baxter is cast to play Marian in a film that centers on the latter’s disappearance in Antarctica. Her immersion into the character unfolds alongside Marian’s own story, as the two women’s fates – and their hunger for self-determination in vastly different geographies and times – collide. The Washington Post celebrated it as a “soaring work of historical fiction. … Great Circle is a relentlessly exciting story about a woman maneuvering her way between tradition and prejudice to get what she wants.”

Jordan Kisner is the author of the essay collection,Thin Places (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and the founder and host of Thresholds, a LitHub Radio podcast. She is also a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and her work has appeared in n+1, The New York Times Magazine, The Believer, The Guardian, The American Scholar, and others.

We Love You, Charlie Freeman was Kaitlyn Greenidge’s debut novel. She is a contributing writer for The New York Times and the features director at Harper’s Bazaar. Her writing has also appeared in Vogue, Glamour, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. Inspired by the life of one of the first Black female doctors in the United States, Libertie: A Novel (Algonquin Books) follows the coming of age of Libertie Sampson, who lives in a free Black community in Reconstruction-era Brooklyn. Her purposeful mother, a practicing physician, has a vision for their future together: Libertie will go to medical school and practice alongside her. But Libertie, drawn more to music than science, is hungry for something else. And unlike her light-skinned mother, Libertie will not be able to pass for white. Finding herself subordinate to her husband and all men, she tries to parse what freedom means for a Black woman. TIME.com admired how “Kaitlyn Greenidge weaves together an intricate narrative about colorism, classism, and community.”