Category: Books

I love doing 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 the chain begins with a book I haven’t read or heard of before, Murmur by Will Eaves. This is the summary from Amazon: Taking its cue from the arrest and legally-enforced chemical castration of Turing, Eaves fictionalises the devastating period before the mathematician’s death in an extraordinary contemplation of consciousness.

Murmur has won several prizes including the 2019 Wellcome Book Prize, an annual award, open to new works of fiction or non-fiction. To be eligible for entry, a book should have a central theme that engages with some aspect of medicine, health or illness.

I checked back to see if I had read any of the earlier  Wellcome Book prize winners. I had to go back to 2010 when The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot was the winning book. I read this in April and thought it was excellent. Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer in 1951. The cancer cells taken from her tumour were cultured and became known as HeLa cells which have formed the basis for medical research and drug development ever since.

The Quarry by Iain Banks is a novel about Guy, a man dying from cancer. He lives in a house that is gradually falling to pieces, situated on the edge of a quarry in the Pennines..Feeling his death is imminent, Guy gathers around him his oldest friends as they reminisce about their time as film students and search through the house for a video tape they had made that could ruin all of their lives if it became public.  It’s the last book Iain Banks wrote – whilst writing it he, himself, was diagnosed with cancer.

Another house in ruins is the setting for the opening of The Ruin, Dervla McTiernan’s debut novel. DI Cormac Reilly has left his high-flying Dublin career to return to Galway, where he is confronted with a case that has haunted him for twenty years. As a young constable he was called to a decrepit country house where he found two silent, neglected children and their mother lying dead upstairs.

Another debut novel is Everything But the Truth by Gillian McAllister set in Newcastle and Oban. This is a thriller about lies, secrets and relationships; about how we get to know people and learn to trust them.

Also set partially in Newcastle is Harbour Street by Ann Cleeves. It begins ten days before Christmas, as the Newcastle Metro is packed with shoppers, babies screaming, office workers merry after pre-Christmas parties where an old lady, Margaret Krukowski, is found fatally stabbed. This book was adapted for TV adaptation, but with many changes from the original.

Another adaptation is the film The Imitation Game starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley about Alan Turing as he tries to crack the German Enigma code.  It’s an adaptation of the book Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges. In 1952 Turing’s homosexuality rendered him a criminal and he was subjected to humiliating treatment. In 1954, aged 41, Alan Turing took his own life – thus linking back to Murmur.

I’ve started and ended with books about Alan Turing, linked by books that have won the Wellcome Book Prize, books about cancer, set in ruined houses, debut novels, books set in Newcastle and books that have been adapted for TV and film.

The books are mostly crime fiction, all of which I’ve read. Although I haven’t read Andrew Hodges’ book I have seen the film – which is excellent!

Next month (July 6, 2019), the chain will begin with the children’s classic, Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak.