Paula McLain

Community Room 301 & 302

The New York Times bestselling author of the critically acclaimed novel The Paris Wife, returns with her highly anticipated historical novel, Circling the Sun. The world is 1920s Kenya, where a glamorous and decadent circle of British expats have carved out a toe-hold of civilization at the edge of the boundless frontier. Abandoned by her mother and inspired by the dangerous beauty around her, Beryl grows into a fierce young woman driven to prove her courage and win independence at any cost. She becomes the first woman to earn her license as a professional racehorse trainer (at eighteen!); one of the very first people in Africa, and the world, to have a commercial pilot’s license; she was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic east to west (the hard way) in 1936; and the first bush pilot to successfully scout game from the air for safari hunters under impossibly dangerous conditions.  

But the terrain Beryl can’t seem to conquer is her own heart. When she meets safari hunter Denys Finch Hatton (immortalized in Out of Africa), and the Danish author Karen Blixen (otherwise know by her penname, Isak Dinesen), she’s catapulted into a passionate love triangle that will change the course of her life. Though neither Blixen or Markham publically acknowledged the relationship in their lifetime, it seared and altered them both, and set Beryl on a course to tackle her greatest adventure yet, flying the Atlantic east to west, two-thousand feet above the icy waves, without radio contact, alone in the dark for twenty-four hours, trusting her instruments and her instincts. Beryl was light years ahead of her time, and her story is as unforgettable as the wildly beautiful country that shaped her. From her untamed childhood, to her many struggles to achieve the freedom she always dreamed of, and finally to the love that tested and changed her life forever, in Circling the Sun, this inspiring, brave and complicated woman is brought to life again by McLain in this powerful new novel