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Lead book review

Another haphazard Booker shortlist lacks literary competence

Philip Hensher finds this year’s Booker shortlist more concerned with serious world issues than vivid characterisation

16 October 2021

9:00 AM

16 October 2021

9:00 AM

The Booker used to be more enthusiastic about the historical novel than it now is. Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle (Doubleday, £16.99) is about an imagined woman pilot who makes her way in the first years of aviation and is thought to have died in a daring feat of navigation from Pole to Pole in 1950.

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