Paula McLain author of the phenomenal bestseller The Paris Wife now returns with her keenly anticipated new novel transporting readers to colonial Kenya in the s Circling the Sun brings to life a fearless and captivating womanmdashBeryl Markham a record-setting aviator caught up in a passionate love triangle with safari hunter Denys Finch Hatton and Karen Blixen who as Isak Dinesen wrote the classic memoir Out of AfricaBrought to Kenya from England as a child and then abandoned by her mother Beryl is raised by both her father and the native Kipsigis tribe who share his estate Her unconventional upbringing transforms Beryl into a bold young woman with a fierce love of all things wild and an inherent understanding of naturersquos delicate balance But even the wild child must grow up and when everything Beryl knows and trusts dissolves she is catapulted into a string of disastrous relationshipsBeryl forges her own path as a horse trainer and her uncommon style attracts the eye of the Happy Valley set a decadent bohemian community of European expats who also live and love by their own set of rules But itrsquos the ruggedly charismatic Denys Finch Hatton who ultimately helps Beryl navigate the uncharted territory of her own heart The intensity of their love reveals Berylrsquos truest self and her fate to flySet against the majestic landscape of early-twentieth-century Africa McLainrsquos powerful tale reveals the extraordinary adventures of a woman before her time the exhilaration of freedom and its cost and the tenacity of the human spiritAdvance praise for Circling the Sun ldquoPaula McLain has such a gift for bringing characters to life I loved discovering the singular Beryl Markham with all her strengths and passions and complexities a woman who persistently broke the rules despite the personal cost Shersquos a rebel in her own time and a heroine for oursrdquomdashJojo Moyes ldquoMcLain cements herself as the writer of historical fictional memoir with Circling the Sun giving vivid voice to Beryl Markham In a brilliant move McLain hardly focuses at all on the transatlantic flight that made the aviator so famous choosing instead to explore what happened before Markhamrsquos unorthodox childhood in Kenya a failed marriage and a star-crossed love affair with Denys Finch Hatton In McLainrsquos confident hands Markham crackles to life and we readers truly understand what made a woman so far ahead of her time believe she had the power to soarrdquomdashJodi PicoultPraise for Paula McLain and The Paris WifeldquoMcLain has brought Hadley Hemingway to life in a novel that begins in a rush of early love A moving portrait of a woman slighted by history a woman whose story needed to be toldrdquomdashThe Boston GlobeldquoThe Paris Wife creates the kind of out-of-body reading experience that dedicated book lovers yearn for nearly as good as reading Hemingway for the first timemdashand it doesnrsquot get much better than thatrdquomdashMinneapolis Star TribuneldquoExquisitely evocative This absorbing illuminating book gives us an intimate view of a sympathetic and perceptive woman the striving writer she married the glittering and wounding Paris circle they were part of McLain reinvents the story of Hadley and Ernestrsquos romance with the lucid grace of a practiced poetrdquomdashThe Seattle TimesldquoA novel thatrsquos impossible to resist Itrsquos all here and it all feels realrdquomdashPeople.
