Books by Maggie Shipstead

“‘Epic’ is the word. This is a book that really pulls off this immersive experience, creating a really richly imagined set of locations and characters and places. This is a book you feel like you can move through. You can see it, you can walk into the rooms. There’s an incredible tangibility about it that I find really powerful, and I don’t know how she does it. She has an incredible ability to make you believe in the reality of what she is describing, even in this exuberantly imaginative book. She’s swinging from the launching of a luxury liner for transatlantic voyages to show-pilots in western Montana in the 1920s and bush pilots in Alaska, to Hawaii in the 1960s and ’70s. And then, of course, there is this other narrative strand set in Hollywood in the here and now. Each of these brings you in, you live in it, and you want to see where you’re going to go next and then live in that one as well. That’s what’s so powerful about this book.” Read more...

The Best Fiction of 2021: The Booker Prize Shortlist

Maya Jasanoff, Historian