Paula McLain, Circling the Sun
NAMED ONE OF NPR’s BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
4:00 pm | Chelsea Clocktower Commons (320 N. Main St.) See map.
Paula McLain is the author of the huge New York Times bestseller, The Paris Wife (2011) and her latest bestselling novel, Circling the Sun (2015), named one of NPR’s best books of the year. With Circling the Sun, McLain masterfully demonstrates why, as writer Ann Patchett declared, “Paula McLain is considered the new star of historical fiction-for good reason.” Her new novel brings to life the amazing story of Beryl Markham, a record-setting aviator caught up in a passionate love triangle with safari hunter Denys Finch Hatton and Karen Blixen, who as Isak Dinesen wrote the classic memoir, Out of Africa. Born in Fresno, California in 1965, McLain and her two sisters became wards of the California Court System after being abandoned by both parents, moving in and out of various foster homes for the next fourteen years. After she aged out of the system, McLain supported herself by working as a nurses aid in a convalescent hospital, a pizza delivery girl, an auto-plant worker, and a cocktail waitress before discovering she could (and very much wanted to) write. McLain received her MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan in 1996. The recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, the Cleveland Arts Prize, the Ohio Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, she is also the author of two collections of poetry; a memoir, Like Family: Growing up in Other People’s Houses (1994), and a first novel, A Ticket to Ride (2008). She lives with her family in Cleveland.
“As chronicled in Paula McLain’s richly textured new novel, Circling the Sun, Beryl 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
