![]() ![]() In Great Circle, Shipstead truly embarks on an adventure the story has a large cast, spans over a century, and leaves little of the world uncovered. Those eliminated 150 pages made a world of difference-possibly even the difference between winning and losing. However, unlike Shipstead, Stuart managed to get his work down to around 450 pages. In the acknowledgments, Shipstead writes: “Paring down an unwieldy thousand-page manuscript into this slender wisp of a thing was not an easy process.” Stuart, having written his winning novel Shuggie Bain over the course of 10 years, echoed this sentiment. ![]() Like last year’s Booker Prize winner Douglas Stuart, Shipstead had to make drastic cuts in her earlier drafts. Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead-shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2021-seemed a strong contender for the prize, but its 600 pages fail to disprove this statement. No book, they insist, needs nor deserves more than that to tell a great story. ![]() ![]() Someone once told me that books should never be more than 500 pages. ![]()
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