Circling the Sun: A Novel

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Knowing how the novel romanticized a painful chapter in Kenyan history made this an uncomfortable read that felt about as real as a Harlequin novel. OK in the movie I see Robert Redford and in the book while reading he's in my head, so perhaps I get it.

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. So long as I can see the lights and imagine the people walking under them, I feel selfishly triumphant, as if I have eluded care and left even the small sorrow of rain in other hands. Beryl Markham led an extraordinary life and Paula McLain’s writing captures it all, serving it with the flourish of a master chef.

West with the Night was first published in 1942, six years after Markham made her historic solo flight from east to west across the Atlantic.

she felt like I expected when she said, "The whole roof could have come down on our heads for all I cared. Her unconventional upbringing transforms Beryl into a bold young woman with a fierce love of all things wild and an inherent understanding of nature's delicate balance. We'd get the reflections of a grown woman living in complicated times, observing social tensions and race relations.Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. I learned what every dreaming child needs to know—that no horizon is so far that you cannot get above it or beyond it. Brilliant from start to finish, Spirits is an impressive debut and will certainly have you on an astral trip through the cosmos.

Africa makes Beryl's mother miserable, and after only a few years, she moves back to England with Beryl's brother, leaving her daughter and her husband alone. It seems like Mansfield and Beryl, who married after knowing each other for four months, might not have discussed whether they wanted children. The author of The Paris Wife takes us to the heart of another true story: set in 1920s colonial Kenya, Circling the Sun is about an unforgettable woman who lives by nobody’s rules but her own. For pages and pages, it was all about horses and then, more horses, then horse races, and then more horses.Devastated by unrequited obsession, Beryl engages in a number of poorly-considered and ill-fated love affairs, some of which end in marriage and all of which end in disaster. She would become the youngest licensed horse trainer, and first women in the world, at the age of eighteen.