Now, I’ll just have to sum up my thoughts from what I remember and wait until the publication to read the ending.

Reviews of Circling the Sun by Paula McLain - BookBrowse

This is a banquet you will not want to miss as it ignites all your senses and satisfies while leaving you wanting more. How someone like her could acquire the capacity to meet and surmount the challenges she faced and become someone so ahead of her time as a woman not bound by the constraints of roles set for gender, class, and race. Since 2000, a cluster of the finest Tāmakai Makaurau (Auckland) jazz musicians, crate-diggers, producers and DJs have come together in an ever-mutating musical collective, The Circling Sun, with their live sets have become almost legendary. The feel of the tunes makes me feel like the Impressions do, Curtis Mayfield, the big spaces and instinctive horns and stuff drifting in and out.

Of course , the book's focus is Beryl, but there are many other fascinating people, many of whom are expats and the relationships they have to each other, many of which are extramarital. Like so many others, this came like a bolt out of the blue and, even though it's well before payday, I had to have this astonishing album on vinyl to prove it exists. Y.Lee flute, bass clarinet, alto, baritone, soprano saxes, Chris O’Connor harp, Finn Scholes trumpet, trombone, vibraphone and Ben Turla acoustic bass, with David Afase, Samara Alofa, Crystal Chen, AJ Fata, Abigail Aroha Jensen, Kenny Sterling, Navakatoa Tekela-Pule and Lisa ‘Romi’ Wright forming the choir. Yet, Circling the Sun is all about white colonialists and their self-enclosed world on their plantations in the East African Protectorate, where the natives are hardly more than an exotic backdrop for the adventures and love affairs of a British floozy. I hadn’t ever encountered anyone quite like her—a woman who lived by her own code instead of society’s, though that cost her much.

Circling the Sun by Paula McLain | Book of the Month Circling the Sun by Paula McLain | Book of the Month

After discussing it with my book group and meeting the author, I liked it better, but still the subject, anything to do with Hemmingway, was not for me.Some of that can be chalked up to her hands-off upbringing and her parents’ negligence, but sometimes we just need to learn from our mistakes. A bossa nova feel permeates the track, with the flute gently gliding to more exotic Asian lines, emphasised at times by stabbing oriental piano chords, perhaps unsurprising given that the song is dedicated to their Japanese friends and a preferred Lake Tekapo restaurant.

Circling Sun - Spirits. Soundway Records. The Circling Sun - Spirits. Soundway Records.

While it has been a long time since I read The Paris Wife, I remember liking it a bit more than Circling the Sun.But all that this book discusses is her fascination for some silly man and the illegal immigrants and their boring lives in Africa. Her determination and love for her horses and childhood friend, a Kenyan native, always pulled her through. From the moment I read even a few sentences, West with the Night took powerful hold of my imagination. She was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west in 1936, but she was a pioneer in many more ways, including being the first licensed female horse trainer in Kenya. Paula McLain is the author of the New York Times and internationally bestselling novels, The Paris Wife, Circling the Sun and Love and Ruin.