BooksPlease

This is a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. On the first Saturday of every month, a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.

Books can be linked in obvious ways – for example, books by the same authors, from the same era or genre, or books with similar themes or settings. Or, you may choose to link them in more personal ways: books you read on the same holiday, books given to you by a particular friend, books that remind you of a particular time in your life, or books you read for an online challenge.

A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the other books on the list, only to the ones next to them in the chain.

This month we are starting with the book you finished last month’s chain with, which for me is In the Heart of the Sea The Epic True Story That Inspired Moby Dick by Nathaniel Philbrick.

It’s a nonfiction book telling the incredible story of the wreck of the whaleship Essex in 1820 in the South Pacific. It was repeatedly rammed and sunk by an eighty-ton bull sperm whale. I haven’t read this book yet; it’s one of my TBRs.

My chain begins anothe book with the word heart in the title. It is Heart of Darkness, a novella by Joseph Conrad, originally a three-part series in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1899. Although a gripping story, this was not an enjoyable book for me. But then, I suppose, it is not meant to be. Conrad was writing about the inhumanity of the way the native population in Africa was treated; the greed and cruelty of the Europeans to gain property, business, trade and profit, draining Africa of its natural resources. It paints an appalling picture.

 I think it shows the darkest depths of human behaviour. In doing so Conrad highlights the prejudices and the cruelty and shows how it was at that time – the graphic reality of what happened. It is a powerful criticism of colonialism at its worst, and full of imagery, casting a spotlight on the barbarity of the so-called civilised Westerners. These few words, uttered by Kurtz concisely summarise the whole story: ‘The horror! The horror!’

The second book in my chain is also a book set in Africa – Thirteen Hours by Deon Meyer (translated from Afrikaans by K L Seegers), crime fiction set in South Africa, DI Benny Griessel has just 13 hours to crack open a conspiracy which threatens the whole country. Rachel, a young American girl is running for her life up the steep slope of Lion’s Head in Capetown.  The body of another American girl is found outside the Lutheran church in Long Street. Her throat slit had been slit. An hour or so later Alexandra Barnard, a former singing star and an alcoholic, wakes from a drunken stupor to find the dead body of her husband, a record producer, lying on the floor opposite her and his pistol lying next to her.

The next book in my chain is The Thirteenth Tale by Diana Setterfield. It took me some time to get into this book and I found myself being both reluctant to read it and yet unable to stop. It was only when I was reading the second part of the book that I found myself actually enjoying it. I usually give up on a book before then. Part of the problem I have with this book is that I couldn’t really like the characters, even Margaret, the narrator irritated me somewhat, even though she loves books. Another problem is the ending, which I found to be contrived.

My fourth book is another book by Diana Setterfield that I enjoyed much more than The Thirteenth Tale is Once Upon a River. It is a beautifully and lyrically told story, and cleverly plotted so that I was not completely sure at times what it was that I was reading. It’s historical fiction with a touch of magic that completely beguiled me with its mysteries and fascinating characters. It’s a mystery beginning in the Swan Inn at Radcot, an ancient inn, well-known for its storytelling, on the banks of the Thames. A badly injured stranger enters carrying the drowned corpse of a little girl. It’s mystifying as hours later the dead child, miraculously it seems, takes a breath, and returns to life. The mystery is enhanced by folklore, by science that appears to be magic, and by romance and superstition.

My fifth book is The Good People by Hannah Kent, another beautifully written book, and an intensely moving tale of Irish rural life in the early 19th century. I grew up reading fairy stories but The Good People gives a frighteningly realistic view of what belief in fairies meant to people dealing with sickness, disease, evil and all the things that go wrong in our lives. It’s set in 1825/6, a long gone world of people living in an isolated community, a place where superstition and a belief in fairies held sway. People talk of others being ‘fairy-swept’ or ‘away with the fairies’, and kept with the music and lights, dancing under the fairy hill. This is a beautifully written book. It is not a fairy story, but one in which their existence is terrifyingly real to the people of the valley.

The Good People is based on true events. And my final link is also based on a true event. West with Giraffes by Lynda Rutledge is historical fiction based on fact about two giraffes who miraculously survived a hurricane while crossing the Atlantic. They then travelled across America from the east coast to the San Diego Zoo, during the Great Hurricane of 1938, the most destructive storm to strike New England in recorded history until 2012’s Hurricane Sandy. It conjures up a vivid picture of America in 1938 during the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, hobo cards, nomadic workers taking jobs where they could, desperate Hooverville dwellers in shanty towns, sundown town racism, and circus animal cruelty. But of course, it is the giraffes that are the two main characters. 

My chain is mainly made up of historical fiction this month travelling from the South Pacific through Africa, England, Ireland and America and from the nineteenth century to the twentieth.

Next month (February 3, 2026) we’ll start with a book that topped lots of 2025 ‘best of’ lists – Flashlight by Susan Choi.