It’s time again for Six Degrees of Separation, a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. Each month a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the other books on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.

This month starts with Butter by Asako Yuzuki, a novel of food and murder. Inspired by a true story this is described on Amazon as a cult Japanese bestseller about a female gourmet cook and serial killer and the journalist intent on cracking her case, a vivid, unsettling exploration of misogyny, obsession, romance and the transgressive pleasures of food in Japan.

My first link is based simply on the title Toast by Nigel Slater, because I love hot buttered toast. It’s the story of his childhood and adolescence told through food; food he liked and food he hated. There are no recipes, but descriptions of toast, cakes, puddings, jam tarts, pancakes, sweets and toffee, tinned ham, lamb chops – you name it and it’s in this book. It’s also a very frank book about a young boy’s feelings and a teenager’s sexual experiences, and his relationship with his mother whom he loved, and his father who sometimes scared him.

My second link is another book by Nigel Slater, Kitchen Diaries. This is an account of more or less everything Nigel cooked in the course of a year, presented as an illustrated diary. The photographs are sublime, and they are done in ‘real time’; they are photos of the food he cooked and ate on that day.The book follows the seasons so you can find suggestions about what is worth eating and when – a book to dip into throughout the year and for years to come. There are recipes for Onion Soup Without Tears, Thyme and Feta Lamb, Roast Tomatoes with Anchovy and Basil, Mushroom Pappardella, Stilton, Onion and Potato Pie and many many more.

My third link is another diary – Ink in the Blood: a Hospital Diary by Hilary Mantel. I was really pleased to find this because I loved Wolf Hall and had tickets for Hilary Mantel’s talk at the Borders Book Festival at Melrose in the summer of 2010.  She had to cancel that because she wasn’t well – I didn’t know just how ill she was. Ink in the Blood reveals all – how she had surgery to remove an intestinal obstruction that ended up in a marathon operation, followed by intense pain, nightmares and hallucinations. Writing was Hilary Mantel’s lifeline – it was the ink, as she wrote in her diary, that reassured her she was alive.

Hallucinations gives me My fourth link in Don’t Look Now, a short story (52 pages, one of five short stories in a collection of Daphne du Murier). It’s a supernatural tale about a couple, John and Laura who have come to Venice to recover after their young daughter’s death. They encounter two old women who claim to have second sight and find themselves caught up in a train of increasingly strange and violent events, involving hallucinations, mistaken identity and a murderer.

My fifth link is also set in Venice, Drawing Conclusions by Donna Leon. It’s the 20th book in her Commissario Guido Brunetti series. Brunetti is somewhat of a rarity in crime fiction novels – a detective who is happily married with two children. He doesn’t smoke or drink to excess and often goes home for lunch to his beautiful wife Paolo. I was immediately drawn into this book, with its wonderful sense of locality, believable characters and intricate plot. It’s more than crime fiction as Brunetti ponders on life, the problems of ageing, and the nature of truth and honesty. 

My final link is via ageing in the crime fiction novel The Betrayal of Trust by Susan Hill. It’s  character-driven, concentrating on the people involved in the crime, a cold case, that of a teenager missing for 16 years, and on Simon’s family. It focuses on the problems of ageing, hospice care, Motor Neurone Disease, assisted suicide, Parkinson’s Disease and Alzheimer’s Disease. A lot to cope with all at once and at times I found The Betrayal of Trust a deeply depressing book.

My chain consists mainly of mystery/crime fiction books, as usual, plus books on food and cooking and a frank account of a stay in hospital after a nightmare operation.

Next month (July , 2024), we’ll start with the 2024 winner of the International Booker Prize, Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (translated by Michael Hofmann).