Why did I love this book?
Circling the Sun is based on the true story of Beryl Markham, a young Englishwoman who became the first person to fly across the Atlantic from England to North America.
We follow her adventures through Kenya as she’s abandoned by her mother, learns how to raise and race horses with her father, then becomes a pilot flying across the Kenyan plains.
The story’s central arc is her sensual awakening to men, her stumblings and fallings, her love for explorer Denis Finch Hatton, and the ways she struggles to make peace with her desire and her individualist, fiercely independent womanhood.
Set in the 1920s and 1930s, this is a truly literary and arousing tale. I love sensuality that doesn’t have to struggle too hard to find its physical touch—and this book does that. It’s a viscerally-told journey—in life and in love, in the arc we all must face as independent women to find our way.
It’s similar to my short story book, in that the sensuality is grounded in the literary interiority of adult steps taken which have gone good and bad; the reconnaissance and healing that’s so often required of our hearts to overcome, to look, to find, to see, and to accept.
5 authors picked Circling the Sun as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
The New York Times bestseller
As a young girl, Beryl Markham was brought to Kenya from Britain by parents dreaming of a new life. For her mother, the dream quickly turned sour, and she returned home; Beryl was brought up by her father, who switched between indulgence and heavy-handed authority, allowing her first to run wild on their farm, then incarcerating her in the classroom. The scourge of governesses and serial absconder from boarding school, by the age of sixteen Beryl had been catapulted into a disastrous marriage - but it was in facing up to this reality that she…