Ernest Hemingway rarely admitted another writer was better than him. But in a private letter to his editor, he confessed something close to it. He said reading her book made him ashamed of himself as a writer, that he felt like nothing more than a carpenter with words next to her. Then, in the very same letter, he called her a high-grade bitch. Both things were true to him at once. Her book went out of print anyway, and the world forgot about her for forty years. Her name was Beryl Markham. She was born in Leicestershire, England, in 1902, and moved to British East Africa, modern-day Kenya, at the age of four. Her mother hated the isolation and went home to England. Beryl stayed. She did not grow up like a colonial child was supposed to. She ran with the Nandi people. She learned to hunt with a spear. She spoke Swahili, Nandi, and Maasai before she was a teenager. At eighteen, she became the first licensed female racehorse trainer in Kenya. It was not seen as impressive. It was seen as scandalous. In her late twenties, she learned to fly. She became a bush pilot in an era when a single engine failure over the African interior usually meant you did not come home. There was no GPS, no radar, no rescue infrastructure for hundreds of miles in any direction. She flew mail to remote outposts. She tracked elephants from the air for safari hunters. She searched wreckage-strewn terrain for downed pilots that others had already given up on. By the time she decided to attempt what came next, she had logged more than two thousand flying hours. In 1936, at thirty-three years old, she decided to fly across the Atlantic. Not the easy direction. The hard one. Charles Lindbergh had flown with the wind, from New York to Paris. Amelia Earhart had flown with the wind too, from Newfoundland to Ireland. No one, man or woman, had ever flown non-stop