Circling the Sun

Starred review from June 15, 2015
McLain's (The Paris Wife) latest showcases her immersive command of setting and character, fictionalizing the exploits of real-life aviator and author Beryl Markham in British Kenya in the early 20th century. Beryl marries young when her father's fortunes fall, but is determined to strike out independently as a horse trainer, even though there are no female horse trainers and she's only in her late teens. She succeeds, though her marriage suffers, and finds herself drawn into a love triangle with famed hunter Denys Finch Hatton and writer Karen Blixen. While her successes in the horse-racing business increase, the scandal around her makes her flee to England for a while. Upon her return to Kenya, her need for freedom has further personal consequences, but also leaves her as the first professional female pilot in the world at a time when flying was exceptionally dangerous, and a record-setter for crossing the Atlantic. McLain paints an intoxicatingly vivid portrait of colonial Kenya and its privileged inhabitants. Markham's true life was incredibly adventurous, and it's easy for readers to identify with this woman who refused to be pigeonholed by her gender. Readers will enjoy taking in the rich world McLain has created.

Starred review from June 1, 2015
A full-throttle dive into the psyche and romantic attachments of Beryl Markham-whose 1936 solo flight across the Atlantic in a two-seater prop plane (carrying emergency fuel in the extra seat) transfixed the world. As conceived in this second historical by novelist McLain (The Paris Wife, 2011, etc.), Markham-nee Beryl Clutterbuck-is the neglected daughter of an impecunious racehorse trainer who fails to make a go at farming in British East Africa and a feckless, squeamish mother who bolts back to England with their older son. Set on her own two feet early, she is barely schooled but precociously brave and wired for physical challenges-a trait honed by her childhood companion Kibii (a lifelong friend and son of a local chief). In the Mau forest-"before Kenya was Kenya"-she finds a "heaven fitted exactly to me." Keeping poised around large mammals (a leopard and a lion also figure significantly) is in her blood and later gains her credibility at the racecourse in Nairobi, where she becomes the youngest trainer ever licensed. Statuesque, blonde, and carrying an air of self-sufficiency-she marries, disastrously, at 16 but is granted a separation to train Lord Delamere's bloodstock-Beryl turns heads among the cheerfully doped and dissolute Muthaiga Club set ("I don't know what it is about Africa, but champagne is absolutely compulsory here"), charms not one but two heirs to the British crown at Baroness Karen Blixen's soiree, and sets her cap on Blixen's lover, Denys Fitch Hatton. She'll have him, too, and much enjoyment derives from guessing how that script, and other intrigues, will play out in McLain's retelling. Fittingly, McLain has Markham tell her story from an altitude of 1,800 feet: "I'm meant to do this," she begins, "stitch my name on the sky." Popularly regarded as "a kind of Circe" (to quote Isak Dinesen biographer Judith Thurman), the young woman McLain explores owns her mistakes (at least privately) and is more boxed in by class, gender assumptions, and self-doubt than her reputation as aviatrix, big game hunter, and femme fatale suggests. Ernest Hemingway, who met Markham on safari two years before her Atlantic crossing, tagged her as "a high-grade bitch" but proclaimed her 1942 memoir West with the Night "bloody wonderful." Readers might even say the same of McLain's sparkling prose and sympathetic reimagining.

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Starred review from June 1, 2015
McLain brought Hadley Richardson Hemingway to light with her best-selling novel, The Paris Wife (2011). Bravo to her for now fictionalizing the grandly adventurous, passionate, and scandalous life of British East African Beryl Markham, the first licensed woman horse trainer and breeder on the continent and an intrepid, record-setting pilot. Ernest Hemingway knew and admired Markham and raved about her breathtaking autobiography, West with the Night (1942), which McLain selectively mines. We meet Beryl as a child abandoned by her mother and allowed to run free as her father raises Thoroughbreds. Fearless, curious, and strong, Beryl learns a warrior's skills with Kibii, a Kipsigis boy, and dreams of a life larger than the confines of domesticity. She resolutely finds her way to daredevilry and terror, love and ostracism as she undertakes the sort of risky and exhilarating things men do even as she suffers through disastrous marriages, homelessness, and a complicated and wrenching entanglement with coffee grower and writer Karen Blixen (i.e., Isak Dinesen of Out of Africa fame) and Denys Fitch Hatton, the exciting and elusive man they both love. McLain sustains a momentum as swift and heart-pounding as one of Beryl's prize horses at a gallop as she focuses on the romance, glamour, and drama of Beryl's blazing life, creating a seductive work of popular historical fiction with sure-fire bio-pic potential.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

February 1, 2015

Doing what she did with such smashing success in The Paris Wife, a portrait of Hadley Richardson's marriage to Ernest Hemingway backdropped by sparkling 1920s Paris, McLain retells the life of another dramatic figure of the era: Beryl Markham, horse trainer, adventurer, and aviator par excellence in far-off Kenya. Beryl survives her mother's abandonment and her father's eventual bankruptcy to become an unconventional force to be reckoned with in the insular British expat colony, forming a triangle with Karen Blixen and her lover Denys Finch Hatton while finding her true self in the skies.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 15, 2015

Famed aviator and renowned racehorse trainer Beryl Markham is only one of the subjects of McLain's captivating new novel. The other is Kenya, the country that formed the complicated, independent woman whom Markham would become. Like her father who raised her, she falls under the spell of Kenya's lush valleys and distant mountains. Here she nurtures her affinity for animals in the wild and learns to breed and tame the most recalcitrant thoroughbreds. But when war and weather affect life at their farm in Ngoro, Beryl's father pressures the 16-year-old into marrying a much older, financially stable neighbor, setting in motion Markham's long history of fleeing the constraints of relationships that threaten her keen desire to live life on her own terms. Only on the back of a horse, at the wheel of a car, or, later, flying over her beloved Africa does she feel fully alive and free. Drawing on Markham's own memoir, West with the Night, McLain vividly introduces this enigmatic woman to a new generation of readers. VERDICT Fictional biography is a hot commodity right now (think Melanie Benjamin or Nancy Horan), and McLain's The Paris Wife was a book group darling. Expect nothing less for this intriguing window into the soul of a woman who refused to be tethered. [See Prepub Alert, 1/5/15.]--Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2015

Famed aviator and renowned racehorse trainer Beryl Markham is only one of the subjects of McLain's captivating new novel. The other is Kenya, the country that formed the complicated, independent woman whom Markham would become. Like her father who raised her, she falls under the spell of Kenya's lush valleys and distant mountains. Here she nurtures her affinity for animals in the wild and learns to breed and tame the most recalcitrant thoroughbreds. But when war and weather affect life at their farm in Ngoro, Beryl's father pressures the 16-year-old into marrying a much older, financially stable neighbor, setting in motion Markham's long history of fleeing the constraints of relationships that threaten her keen desire to live life on her own terms. Only on the back of a horse, at the wheel of a car, or, later, flying over her beloved Africa does she feel fully alive and free. Drawing on Markham's own memoir, West with the Night, McLain vividly introduces this enigmatic woman to a new generation of readers. VERDICT Fictional biography is a hot commodity right now (think Melanie Benjamin or Nancy Horan), and McLain's The Paris Wife was a book group darling. Expect nothing less for this intriguing window into the soul of a woman who refused to be tethered. [See Prepub Alert, 1/5/15.]--Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.