Great Circle, by Maggie Shipstead (Knopf)

Never mind that a century separates Marian Graves and Hadley Baxter, the two headstrong protagonists of Maggie Shipstead’s sweeping novel Great Circle. One is a tomboy determined to join the ranks of the first female pilots, the other a disgraced star of a Twilight- like franchise whose romantic entanglements have upended her career. The pair are both orphans raised by uncles and united by an imperviousness to the sexism that casts a pall over their respective moments. Oh, and Hadley’s next part is the lead in a biopic of Marian. The Marian portions rove from Montana to Manhattan to Scotland and Antarctica, and read like a carnival of early-20th-century American history, packed with bootleggers, treacherous boxcar rides, and tragic shipwrecks. The Hadley chapters, in turn, offer a delectable dissection of life as a celebrity, serving up an intelligent skewering of the Hollywood machine and allowing the book to take flight.—