Summary of Paula McLain's Circling the Sun is a novelized account of the life of Beryl Markham written by Paula McLain. Beryl broke all the rules for a proper young lady as she grew up in colonial Kenya, then broke ground for women everywhere, first as a horse trainer and then as an aviator. Her headstrong determination did not serve her as well, however, when it came to her personal life. She plunged into two youthful marriages that imploded and one earth-shattering, but doomed affair. Paula McLain weaves all this together into a novelized biography of the first half of Beryl's unique life that takes her from childhood to her attempt at age 34 to become the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic from Europe to Canada.

In 1904, as a toddler, Beryl moved to Kenya, then known as British East Africa, with her parents, Clara and Charles Clutterbuck, and her older brother, Dickie...