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Circling the Sun: A Novel Paperback – May 31, 2016

by Paula McLain (Author)

4.3 25,966 ratings

Editors' pick Best Literature & Fiction

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR, BOOKPAGE, AND SHELF AWARENESS • “Paula McLain is considered the new star of historical fiction, and for good reason. Fans of The Paris Wife will be captivated by Circling the Sun, which . . . is both beautifully written and utterly engrossing.”—Ann Patchett, Country Living

This powerful novel transports readers to the breathtaking world of Out of Africa—1920s Kenya—and reveals the extraordinary adventures of Beryl Markham, a woman before her time. Brought to Kenya from England by pioneering parents dreaming of a new life on an African farm, Beryl is raised unconventionally, developing a fierce will and a love of all things wild. But after everything she knows and trusts dissolves, headstrong young Beryl is flung into a string of disastrous relationships, then becomes caught up in a passionate love triangle with the irresistible safari hunter Denys Finch Hatton and the writer Baroness Karen Blixen. Brave and audacious and contradictory, Beryl will risk everything to have Denys’s love, but it’s ultimately her own heart she must conquer to embrace her true calling and her destiny: to fly.

Praise for Circling the Sun

“In McLain’s confident hands, Beryl 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 soar.”—Jodi Picoult, author of Leaving Time

“Enchanting . . . a worthy heir to [Isak] Dinesen . . . Like Africa as it’s so gorgeously depicted here, this novel will never let you go.”—The Boston Globe

“Famed aviator Beryl Markham is a novelist’s dream. . . . [A] wonderful portrait of a complex woman who lived—defiantly—on her own terms.”—People (Book of the Week)

“Circling the Sun soars.”—Newsday

“Captivating . . . [an] irresistible novel.”—The Seattle Times

“Like its high-flying subject, Circling the Sun is audacious and glamorous and hard not to be drawn in by. Beryl Markham may have married more than once, but she was nobody’s wife.”—Entertainment Weekly

“[An] eloquent evocation of Beryl’s daring life.”—O: The Oprah Magazine

Print length

400 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Ballantine Books
Publication date

May 31, 2016
Dimensions

5.23 x 1.06 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

0345534204
ISBN-13

978-0345534200
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Popular Highlights in this book

What are popular highlights?

“We’re all of us afraid of many things, but if you make yourself smaller or let your fear confine you, then you really aren’t your own person at all—are you? The real question is whether or not you will risk what it takes to be happy.”
Highlighted by 2,565 Kindle readers
How close people could be to us when they had gone as far away as possible, to the edges of the map. How unforgettable.
Highlighted by 1,456 Kindle readers
“I’ve sometimes thought that being loved a little less than others can actually make a person, rather than ruin them.”
Highlighted by 1,390 Kindle readers

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Paula McLain cements herself as the writer of historical fictional memoir with Circling the Sun, giving vivid voice to Beryl Markham, a singular, extraordinary woman. In McLain’s 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 soar.”—Jodi Picoult, author of Leaving Time

“Richly textured . . . Markham’s life is the stuff of legend. . . . McLain has created a voice that is lush and intricate to evoke a character who is enviably brave and independent.”—NPR

“Bold, absorbing fiction.”—New York Daily News

“Paula 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. She’s a rebel in her own time, and a heroine for ours.”—Jojo Moyes, author of Me Before You

“By the last pages, readers will hate to say goodbye to such an irresistible narrator.”—Miami Herald

“Paula McLain brings Beryl to glorious life, portraying a woman with a great many flaws that seem to result from her zest for life and inability to follow the roles expected of women in the 1920s and ’30s.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Amelia Earhart gets all the airtime, but this pilot had the juicier past. . . . McLain crafts a story readers won’t soon forget.”—Good Housekeeping

“With a sharp eye for detail and style to spare, Paula McLain captures the nuances of complex relationships, the rigidity of social conventions, and the wide skies and breathtaking vistas of Africa.”—Christina Baker Kline, author of Orphan Train

“Set in 1920s Kenya, this fictionalized history of the beautiful, high-flying aviator Beryl Markham is as luminous as its headstrong heroine. An exhilarating ride.”—Family Circle

“Paula McLain is yet another twenty-first-century woman who can write rings around the hyper-masculine men who dominate so much of American fiction.”—Liz Smith

“McLain’s skill at blending fact and fiction, which dazzled readers in The Paris Wife, is on full display. . . . Circling the Sun is a masterful story of hardship, courage and love.”—Shelf Awareness

About the Author

Paula McLain is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Love and Ruin, Circling the Sun, The Paris Wife, and A Ticket to Ride, the memoir Like Family: Growing Up in Other People’s Houses, and two collections of poetry. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Good Housekeeping, O: The Oprah Magazine, Town & Country, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, and elsewhere. She lives in Ohio with her family.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Before Kenya was Kenya, when it was millions of years old and yet still somehow new, the name belonged only to our most magnificent mountain. You could see it from our farm in Njoro, in the British East African Protectorate—hard edged at the far end of a stretching golden plain, its crown glazed with ice that never completely melted. Behind us, the Mau Forest was blue with strings of mist. Before us, the Rongai Valley sloped down and away, bordered on one side by the strange, high Menengai Crater, which the natives called the Mountain of God, and on the other by the distant Aberdare Range, rounded blue-grey hills that went smoky and purple at dusk before dissolving into the night sky.

When we first arrived, in 1904, the farm wasn’t anything but fifteen hundred acres of untouched bush and three weather-beaten huts.

“This?” my mother said, the air around her humming and shimmering as if it were alive. “You sold everything for this?”

“Other farmers are making a go of it in tougher places, Clara,” my father said.

“You’re not a farmer, Charles!” she spat before bursting into tears.

He was a horseman, in fact. What he knew was steeplechasing and foxhunting and the tame lanes and hedgerows of Rutland. But he’d seen paper flyers hawking cheap imperial land, and an idea had latched on to him that wouldn’t let go. We left Westfield House, where I was born, and travelled seven thousand miles, past Tunis and Tripoli and Suez, the waves like great grey mountains swallowing the sky. Then through Kilindini Harbour, in the port of Mombasa, which smelled of sharp spices and drying fish, and onto the snaking train bound for Nairobi, the windows boiling over with red dust. I stared at everything, completely thrilled in a way I hadn’t remembered feeling before. Whatever this place was, it was like nothing and nowhere else.

We settled in and worked to make our situation liveable, pushing against the wildness while the wildness pushed back with everything it had. Our land had no visible borders or fences, and our huts lacked proper doors. Silky, banded colobus monkeys climbed through the burlap sacking covering our windows. Plumbing was unheard of. When nature called, you walked out into the night with all the things that wanted to have at you and hung your derrière over a long-drop, whistling to keep your fear away.

Lady and Lord Delamere were our nearest white neighbours, a seven-mile hack through the bush. Their titles didn’t save them from sleeping in the typical mud-and-thatch rondavels. Lady D kept a loaded revolver under her pillow and advised my mother to do the same—but she wouldn’t. She didn’t want to shoot snakes or her dinner. She didn’t want to drag water for miles to have anything like a decent bath, or to live without company for months at a time. There was no society. There was no way to keep her hands clean. Life was simply too hard.

After two years, my mother booked a passage back to England. My older brother, Dickie, would go too, since he had always been frail and wouldn’t weather Africa for very much longer. I had yet to turn five when they climbed aboard the twice-weekly train to Nairobi with steamer trunks and handkerchiefs and travelling shoes.

The white feather in my mother’s helmet trembled as she kissed me, telling me I should keep my chin up. She knew I’d be fine, since I was such a big strong girl. As a treat, she would send a box of liquorice allsorts and pear drops from a shop in Piccadilly that I wouldn’t have to share with a soul.

I watched the train recede along the still black line of the track, not quite believing she would actually go. Even when the last shuddering car was swallowed up by distant yellow hills, and my father turned to me, ready to go back to the farm and his work; even then I thought the whole thing was a mistake, some terrible misunderstanding that would all get sorted at any moment. Mother and Dickie would disembark at the next station, or turn around at Nairobi and be back the next day. When that didn’t happen, I kept waiting all the same, listening for the far-off rumble of the train, one eye on the horizon, my heart on tiptoe.

For months there was no word from my mother, not even a dashed-off cable, and then the sweets arrived. The box was heavy and bore only my name—Beryl Clutterbuck—in my mother’s curlicued script. Even the shape of her handwriting, those familiar dips and loops, instantly had me in tears. I knew what the gift meant and couldn’t fool myself any more. Scooping the box into my arms, I made off to a hidden corner where, trembling, I ate up as many of the sugar-dusted things as I could stand before retching into a stable bucket.

Later, unable to drink the tea my father had made, I finally dared to say what I feared most.

“Mother and Dickie aren’t coming back, are they?”

He gave me a pained look. “I don’t know.”

“Perhaps she’s waiting for us to come to her.”

There was a long silence, and then he allowed that she might be. “This is our home now,” he said. “And I’m not ready to give up on it just yet. Are you?”

My father was offering a choice, but it wasn’t a simple one. His question wasn’t Will you stay here with me? That decision had been made months before. What he wanted to know was if I could love this life as he did. If I could give my heart to this place, even if she never returned and I had no mother going forward, perhaps not ever.

How could I begin to answer? All around us, half-empty cupboards reminded me of the things that used to be there but weren’t any longer—four china teacups with gold-painted rims, a card game, amber beads clicking together on a necklace my mother had loved. Her absence was still so loud and so heavy, I ached with it, feeling hollow and lost. I didn’t know how to forget my mother any more than my father knew how he might comfort me. He pulled me— long limbed and a little dirty, as I always seemed to be—onto his lap, and we sat like that quietly for a while. From the edge of the forest, a group of hyraxes echoed shrieks of alarm. One of our greyhounds cocked a sleek ear and then settled back into his comfortable sleep by the fire. Finally my father sighed. He scooped me under my arms, grazed my drying tears with a quick kiss, and set me on my own two feet.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Ballantine Books; Reprint edition (May 31, 2016)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 400 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0345534204
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0345534200
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.23 x 1.06 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #115,470 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #7,420 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- #8,268 in American Literature (Books)
- #10,929 in Historical Fiction (Books)

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Paula McLain

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Paula McLain is the author of the the New York Times bestselling novels The Paris Wife, Circling the Sun, and Love and Ruin. Now she introduces When the Stars Go Dark, an atmospheric tale of intertwined destinies and heart-wrenching suspense. McLain was born in Fresno, California in 1965. After being abandoned by both parents, she and her two sisters became wards of the California Court System, moving in and out of various foster homes for the next fourteen years. When she aged out of the system, she supported herself by working as a nurses aid in a convalescent hospital, a pizza delivery girl, an auto-plant worker, a cocktail waitress--before discovering she could (and very much wanted to) write. She received her MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan in 1996, and is the author of two collections of poetry, a memoir, Like Family: Growing Up in Other People's Houses, and the debut novel, A Ticket to Ride. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, O: the Oprah Magazine, Good Housekeeping, Real Simple, Huffington Post, the Guardian and elsewhere. She lives with her family in Cleveland.

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Patricia Perez

Amazing characters

Reviewed in the United States on August 19, 2015

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After the success of her novel, The Paris Wife, Paula McLain brings us another fictional autobiography of a complicated, strong woman. I don’t know how Paula picks the women she depicts but she does a great job in selecting three-dimensional, complicated, intriguing characters.

Beryl is raised in colonial Kenya, born to an English famous horse trainer, she explores the landscapes of Kenya with her friends, growing free and falling in love with nature and horses. When her mother leaves back to England, she is left with her father who doesn’t quite know what to do with her. He tries to put her in school and make a lady out of her, but instead, once the family farm, Green Hills, falls to trouble, she ends up marrying at the age of sixteen.

Feeling suffucated in her marriage and having a few affairs with other men in the colony, Beryl struggles for her freedom, the freedom she enjoyed as a child.

THe beauty of this book comes from its characters. Even though the reader would not agree with every decision Beryl makes, one understands it and her struggle. Throguhout the book, the reader is rooting for her and her happiness and comes to the realization that Beryl is a free spirit that cannot be fenced or domesticated. She becomes the first woman trainer in Africa and also the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. Her adventurous spirit resonates through every single page of the book and, in fact, she cannot be confined to those pages.

In addition to Beryl, the secondary characters in this book, also molded after their real-life figures, are absolutely wonderful. McLain takes her time developing each and every one of the characters. Even minor ones who seem to have no effect on Beryl become central forces. It is expected, as the colony has a feeling of being infinite but also so small that there are no secrets. Everyone seems to be in love with someone other than the people they should.

There are times in the book were the reader feels hopeless for Beryl, nothing seems to be going right. But by the end of the book the reader is left satisfied, if maybe a little frustrated that they hadn’t heard of Beryl before. Beryl was way ahead of her times and although she definitely makes choices that are questionable, one can admire her strong will and her full life.

Like The Paris Wife, Paula McLain takes a female character out of history that seems to have been forgotten. She explores not only the events that shaped their lives but their deep desires and fears as well. Circling the Sun is a fantastic novel. Paula McLain’s writing is absolutely beautiful and poetic. The lyricism and beautiful flow of everything carries the reader from one page or the other. Even in the subject does not intrigue you, her writing will capture you and not let you go until you reach the last page.

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Bdme Vdfeji

Before Kenya was Kenya, a Girl Could Turn and Live with Animals

Reviewed in the United States on July 31, 2016

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I finished McLain’s Circling the Sun just his morning. I enjoyed it more than The Paris Wife, but maybe my preference is related to an interest the time period and specific characters, not to mention the engaging setting description and imagery in Circling the Sun. I had loved reading Beryl Markham’s West with the Night and Dinesen’s (Karen von Blixen’s) Out of Africa over 25 years ago, so revisiting the characters and Africa of the time period was a treat. Be SURE you read the prologue and the epilogue as they frame the story. The author’s note is worth reading, so don’t skip it when you finish the book. If you have an interest in Markham and the time period, in addition to reading her and Dinesen’s books, I also highly recommend Markham’s biography by Mary S. Lovell Straight on Til Morning. (BTW, Lovell’s Amelia Earhart biography is excellent too.)
McLain writes the story as a first person memoir, and this works very well to get the reader inside Beryl’s head as a young, wild, undisciplined English girl raised by her father on a farm in Africa in a place and time in which society limited women’s roles, even in this remote locale. McLain’s descriptive imagery seemed a little overdone in passages, but it did allow the reader to see Africa and people the way Beryl might have, and I found the poetic quality of it pleasurable. Also, I could hear the time period, the author’s own Whitmanesque love of nature (like the poem Denys Finch Hatten reads in the book), not to mention echoes of Beryl Markham and Karen von Blixen’s (Isak Dinesen) books in McLain’s novel. As a more literary reader, I appreciated this. Still, whether one is a literary reader or not, Circling the Sun is enjoyable reading for contemporary readers and introduces these larger-than-life people to a new generation.
Some readers have complained that Beryl Markham was not a very likable character; to that I say, Beryl Markham was a highly flawed person which makes for an INTERESTING character. Larger-than-life people typically have major personal flaws, but their lives are often intriguing. Think of every hard-boiled detective, every Shakespearean character, every drama or tragedy – they feature flawed people. In McLain’s book, we learn how Markham’s childhood created the foundation for the fascinating, but emotionally broken woman she would become. And, let’s face it – people are still intolerant of women who live their lives, particularly their love lives, like men do.
McLain opened the main story in Part One (her three parts would align beautifully with a great screenplay for a mini-series which I hope someone produces) with the line “Before Kenya was Kenya, when it was millions of years old and yet still somehow new, . . . “ she creates the same reflective tone from the first sentence just as Dinesen/vonBlixen did Out of Africa, “I once had a farm in Africa . . .” Markham’s book West with the Night begins “How is it possible to bring order our of memory? I should like to begin at the beginning, patiently, like a weaver at his loom. I should like to say, ‘this is the place to start; there can be no other.’ But there are a hundred places to start . . .” Also, I mention this first line of McLain’s book because later in the novel, Denys invites Beryl to Karen von Blixen’s place, but tells her she must bring a story. All the stories have to begin: “Before Kenya was Kenya, when it was millions of years old and yet still somehow new . . .”
McLain’s novel Circling the Sun tells a new version of an old story in a way that will engage, educate, and interest historical fiction and contemporary readers.

West with the Night
Straight on Till Morning: The Life of Beryl Markham
Out of Africa: and Shadows on the Grass

8 people found this helpful

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Jeff Goubeaud

Circling The Sun

Reviewed in the United States on March 18, 2024

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Great book. Very well written. A nice companion to Beryl Markam’s West With The Night.

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Virginia

A touching story of strength, love, and loss

Reviewed in the United States on December 5, 2023

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I read Out of Africa a very long time ago and lived it. Paula McLain's novel is closer to the real life story of Beryl. She writes so beautifully; every word is like poetry. It is the story of a modern woman living in a world where men still controlled our fate.
Berly strove to be her own person and break out of the bindings of that era. She endured through it all with a purpose to be who she always was - a free spirit. This is a story that deserves to live on in the hearts of women who strive to be as free as she was.

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bookmolly

Marvellous

Reviewed in Germany on December 30, 2022

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Well written story of a life “ stranger than Fiction“. An exzellent attempt to depict a personality with feelings and motivation and an overwhelming for Africa.

mala

Absorbing

Reviewed in India on January 23, 2021

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Enjoyed the book- interesting information about early life of Europeans in Africa- through the life of an extraordinary woman.
Good

CHRISTINA Z C FACO

A free spirit woman

Reviewed in Brazil on January 4, 2018

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I loved this book. Through its pages, I became Beryl’s friend, and learned about this unique woman ahead of her time. I also saw the colors of her beloved Africa and its power on people

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Kaitlin brondum

INCREDIBLE.

Reviewed in France on October 17, 2017

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Incredible story, incredible author and writing style.
A swirl of detail that captures you in the moment making you feel like you're living the main character's life standing just next to her.

THANK YOU PAULA MCLAIN for making me love reading.

Finished it in under a week despite my busy schedule <3

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Jenny Lowen

Unexpectedly gripping

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 12, 2016

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I expected a biography, but received a fantastic novel. Such a well-written, graphic, emotionally stirring book that kept me grasped in its process of an amazing life. This lady lived dangerously, filled with a drive to achieve and prove that she had value. Cannot recommend this read more highly.

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