Circling the Sun by Paula McClain
The love triangle between Markham, Karen Blixen (Danish writer Isak Dinesen, famous for her memoir Out of Africa), and Denys Finch Hatton forms the heart of the book. The stormy romances and the struggles to maintain loyalty all come to a head at a shooting party at Blixen’s. McLain focuses as much on the small emotional moments that define a life as she does on external thrills, though there are certainly plenty of those, including escaping from the jaws of a lion as a child and nearly tumbling from a wood-and-rope bridge on a horse. Markham was the kind of real-life action/adventure heroine you would expect to find in an Indiana Jones movie.
Paula McLain
Open this novel for the allure of meeting an unforgettable historical character through a fictional biography, but stay for the sophistication of the prose. McLain describes Africa with unfailingly beautiful language:
“Flowers sprang across the plains in every color you could dream up. The air was thick with jasmine and coffee blossoms, juniper berries, and eucalyptus. Kenya had only been sleeping, the rain said now.”
When circumstances take Markham to London and into the company of royalty, the atmosphere is just as genuine, and the whiff of scandal that followed her from Kenya remains.
Hemingway called Markham’s memoir, West with the Night (1942), “a bloody wonderful book.” It must have given McLain much fodder, but the well-realized first-person voice she creates here is all down to her own skill. “I’m not after an easy life,” she has Markham say; “Somebody has to go first at everything.” That kind of gumption has inspired readers for 70 years, and thanks to Circling the Sun, will continue to do so for years to come.
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