The book starts in the early 1900’s and follows Captain Addison Graves, who escaped a life at the family farm by going to sea as a young man. As luck would have it, he once saved the life of the ship company owner Lloyd Feiffer, and Lloyd has been looking out for him ever since, eventually promoting him to Captain at his cross-Atlantic passenger ship Josephina. It is onboard Josephina that Addison meets Annabel, a beautiful but deeply troubled young woman. The reader learns that she was sexually abused by her father as a child and accused by her mother of being “wicked,” which led them to send her to awful boarding schools, and eventually circumcise her in order to “control her lusts.” Emotionally very fragile, Annabel seduces Addison, but their one-night stand turns into marriage when she gets pregnant with twins. The first months of their marriage are good, but when the twins, Marian and Jamie, are born, Annabel goes into deep postpartum depression.
WWI arrives and Addison takes Annabel with him on the ship as he doesn’t trust her to be alone with the babies. Little does Addison know that Lloyd has smuggled explosive weapons to France onboard the Josephina. One night, there is a big explosion when the weapons ignite by mistake. In the tumult that ensues, the depressed Annabel disappears, most likely taking the chance and jumping into the cold ocean. Addison is left with the crying babies. He tries to find a person who can take the babies one of the life boats, but can’t bear giving the children away, and ends up getting into the life boat himself, even though he, as a Captain, should be the last one leaving the ship. In the aftermath, Addison is publicly shamed and sent for ten years to the Sing-Sing prison for neglect. Lloyd never speaks up to defend him, nor tells him what caused the explosion. Many years later, when Lloyd is long dead, his wife Matilda Feiffer learns his secret from a relative. The Lloyd family is very wealthy and Matilda contacts the twins, as she wants to somehow repay her family’s debt. Marian is by now an adult, and a pilot. She asks Matilda to sponsor her trip around the world – pole to pole. To Marian’s surprise, Matilda agrees without batting an eye. On the condition that Marian writes about her travels in a diary they can later publish.
In present time, the reader follows the former child star Hadley Baxter, who is the current poster girl of the blockbuster “Archangel” franchise (a Twilight-like move and bestselling book phenomena). However, she has just been fired from the films after cheating on her costar/real-life boyfriend and as such “damaging the brand”. Struggling to survive the tabloid frenzy, she grasps at an offer for the comeback role: to play the famed female pilot Marian Graves in a biopic. The reader learns that Marian went missing during her epic flight around the world, her plane never to be found again, but years later her diary was found by her last camp at the South Pole. Hadley immediately connects with the role – as well as with Redmond Fieffer, Matilda Feiffer’s grandson, who is the producer of the movie.
The narrative then jumps back in time to the small town Missoula, Montana, in the 1920s and 30s. Marian and her twin brother Jamie are growing up with their uncle Wallace. He’s a goodhearted painter, but has a problem with drinking and gambling and lets the children roam freely in the woods. After ten years in prison Addison briefly returns to Missoula, but leaves before meeting his twins, not knowing how to re-connect with the children he hasn’t seen since they were babies. This wounds Marian and Jamie, but they move on, seeing Wallace as the only father they ever had. The twins have a close friendship with a boy named Caleb, another outsider of sorts, who is the son of one of the local prostitutes.
A couple of years later, a pair of aerobats take their fantastical show to a Missoula airfield. Watching them roll, dive, and loop their small plane instantly transforms Marian, and she can think of nothing else but flying. The years that follow she does everything she can to take flying lessons, but she has no money and no one wants to teach a girl. Then depression and the prohibition hits America, and as a way to make money she starts to deliver moonshine and illegally smuggled alcohol from Canada. One night on a delivery run to the local brothel, she meets the darkly intriguing man Barclay Mcqueen, a rich rancher and bootlegger. She is fifteen years old, Barclay is twenty-eight, but he is immediately transfixed by her. He soon makes her an offer – he will pay for all the flying lessons she wants. Unspoken is the promise that she one day will marry him. Marian hesitantly accepts, but soon the joy of flying takes over, and she proves to be a true talent. She is soon flying all over, with time helping smuggling alcohol across the Canadian border in her small plane. She remains close to Caleb and the two of them starts a sexual relationship, but are never officially an item, and they later break it off and drift apart, partly because of fear of Barclay’s objections.
In the meantime, Wallace has fallen deep into gambling debts and is drinking heavily. Jamie, who is now 17, can’t see his twin sister slipping away into the arms of the dubious and dominating Barclay, leaves the home and goes to Seattle for work for a summer, where his talent as a painter is discovered and he falls in love for the first time. However, he is eventually rejected by his love interest Sarah Fahey’s upper class family and he returns to Missoula, where he is met by the news that Marian and Barclay are engaged. In horror, he tries to make his sister change her mind, but it turns out that Barclay has bought up all of Wallace gambling debts, an astronomical sum, and blackmailed Marian into the marriage. Jamie says there must be another way to solve this, but Marian has somewhere along the way also fallen for the controlling Barclay and decides to go through with the wedding, praying she will be able to continue flying even as Mrs Mcqueen.
Unfortunately, Marian and Barclay’s marriage deteriorates quickly after they settle on his ranch. Barclay tries to forbid Marian from flying. Worse, he is insistent that she have a baby, and she is determined not to. After she flies despite his prohibition, he turns violent. He is immediately contrite, but Marian makes her eventual forgiveness conditional on him allowing her to fly. However, the truce doesn’t last long. Only when she finally gets pregnant does Marian leave Barclay, departing with her plane in the night. Meanwhile, Jamie has settled in a village in British Columbia, and when she goes to him, he advises her to seek out his Mrs. Fahey – Sarah’s mother – in Seattle, who helps her end her pregnancy. Marion makes her way to Alaska and becomes a bush pilot specializing in glacier flying, under a false identity. She keeps up an irregular relationship with Caleb, but they are never officially a couple. A few years later, she is able to fly under her real name again, when she learns that Barclay has been imprisoned for his bootleg dealings, and later shot to death by an unidentified man.
As WWII approaches, Marian buries herself in her flying, while Jamie, initially infatuated with his village and several of the women there, finds himself edging back toward the larger world. After Pearl Harbor, Marian hears that American female pilots are being recruited for the Air Transport Auxiliary in Britain. She goes to New York to be interviewed and then by freighter to the UK, forming a close friendship with another pilot, Ruth. As they go to work transporting warplanes to where the RAF needs them, their relationship turns, despite resistance, into a romance. Caleb arrives in England in preparation for the invasion, and something like a love triangle forms. Meanwhile, Jamie has made a career as a successful artist, and at a exhibit opening in Seattle, he meets Sarah Fahey again, and she confesses that she once was in love with him too, but now she’s married and her husband about to join the war. Some time later, on Sarah’s suggestion, Jamie joins the Navy as a combat artist and gone to the Aleutian Islands and then the South Pacific. He makes a brief stop in Seattle and he and Sarah meet up for one night at his hotel. In October 1943 his ship is hit by a Japanese submarine and he is killed.
In present time, we follow Hadley in short sections as the production of movie moves forward, and the various complicated relationships with the crew and her ex-boyfriend from Archangel. She also has a fling with Redmond Fieffer. Hadley meets an artist, Adelaide Scott, who later calls her, telling her that she has a a lifetime of letter correspondence from Marian Graves as well as a few of her belongings. It turns out that she is Jamie’s secret biological daughter, Sarah got pregnant that night at the hotel. Hadley starts to dig into Marian’s past and what actually happened at the end of her flight around the world when she went missing.
Marian is devastated by Jamie’s death, and later on Ruth also dies in the war, but she keeps in touch with Caleb, and with Eddie, Ruth’s husband, whom just like Ruth, is gay, they married each other to keep each other’s secret. In 1950, Marian is contacted by Matilda Fieffer – as we had learned early on in the book – and sets out to fly around the world via the two poles. She brings Eddie with her as her navigator. For her, the journey has more to do with soothing an inner restlessness and existential longing and sadness, rather than for fame and glory. They start in Auckland, New Zealand, and stop in Oahu, Hawaii, where Caleb now lives, unexpectedly remaining for more than two weeks before continuing on to Alaska and then over the North Pole. They cross Europe, reach South Africa, and then Antarctica, where they are hit by terrible weather. They survive a severe storm and manage to repair the plane, but when it’s time to take off for the final leg back to New Zealand, Eddie refuses to get on the flight. His biggest fear is to drown and he doesn’t think they’ll make it there alive. He has decided to stay behind and die on the ice. Marian is crushed but can’t convince him to come with her. She leaves him at the old weather station where they have camped, together with her log book.
In present day, Hadley is visiting Hawaii to shoot some of the final scenes of the movie. There she connects with some of Caleb’s friends. He has now passed away. They let her look through the letter collection he left behind, and she finds a couple of letters with a very familiar handwriting…and a photo of a man in New Zealand who worked as a sheep farmer in a remote village, who Caleb was apparently regularly visiting over the last decades of his life. Hadley understands that this must be Marian, living under another identity. However, she never shares her finding with the film team or with Redmond, perhaps a sign that she is now building a new identify of her own, having been in the claws off the film world since she was a teenager.
In the final chapters, the reader learns that Marian didn’t crash in the ocean. She contemplated it, but managed to steer her plane on her own to a remote island in the Antarctic Ocean/South Pacific and jumped out with her parachute, letting the plane crush in the ocean. She survived from the help of the two men managing the weather station there, and a few months later, is taken with a ship back to New Zealand, where she poses as a man and becomes a sheep farmer. Years later, her log book is found in Antarctica and she manages to somehow claim the royalties from the book. She buys her old farm, and finally contacts Caleb again. Over the last decades of their lives, they both keep in touch.
