It’s time again for Six Degrees of Separation, a monthly link-up hosted by Kate atBooks 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 we start with The Safekeep by Yael Van Der Wouden, the Women’s Prize Winner for Fiction 2025. This is Amazon’s description:
It is fifteen years after the Second World War, and Isabel has built herself a solitary life of discipline and strict routine in her late mother’s country home, with not a fork or a word out of place. But all is upended when her brother Louis delivers his graceless new girlfriend, Eva, at Isabel’s doorstep – as a guest, there to stay for the season…
In the sweltering heat of summer, Isabel’s desperate need for control reaches boiling point. What happens between the two women leads to a revelation which threatens to unravel all she has ever known.
First link: I really didn’t know how to start this chain, until I remembered that the cover of Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte also has doors, although they are closed doors as opposed to the open doors on The Safekeep. This is a novel about a young woman, a governess and her experiences working for two families in Victorian England. Agnes is the younger daughter of an impoverished clergyman. Her parents had married against her mother’s family’s wishes and when their fortune was wrecked Agnes determines to help out by working as a governess. It gives a very clear picture of the life of a governess, with all its loneliness, frustrations, insecurities and depressions.
I am staying with doors for the second link, although they are not shown not on the cover, but in the title, with Doors Open by Ian Rankin. This was the first Rankin book wrote after he retired John Rebus in Exit Music. It’s about an art heist – planned by Mike Mackenzie, a self-made man, rich and bored with life, Robert Gissing, the head of Edinburgh’s College of Art and Allan Crickshank a banker with a passion for art that he cannot afford to buy on his salary. Between them they devise a plan to steal some of the most valuable paintings from the National Gallery of Scotland on the day that buildings normally closed to the public throw open their doors and invite them in.
My Third link is Exit Music by Ian Rankin, the 17th Inspector Rebus novel. The Crime Thriller Award for Author of the Year 2008 was awarded to Ian Rankin for this book. It marked the end of an era as Rebus came to the end of his career. At the beginning of this book Rebus is 10 days from his retirement and is anxious to tie up all the loose ends in his current cases, trying to get DS Siobhan Clarke interested in them. So when the body of the dissident Russian poet Alexander Todorov is found dead this is Rebus’s last case. He throws himself into the investigation, desperate to take his mind off the end of his career.
Which brings me rather obviously to my fourth linkExit Lines by Reginald Hill, a Dalziel and Pascoe murder mystery. In this one there are three elderly victims who all died violently one cold and storm-racked November night. A drunken Dalziel is a suspect in one as it seems he was driving the car that hit an elderly cyclist. The plot is intricate, with each separate case being linked together. I thought it was an excellent crime fiction novel which kept me guessing until the end.
My Fifth link is also about a murder that took place during a stormy night. It’s The Redemption of Alexander Seaton by Shona MacLean. Alexander Seaton is a schoolteacher in Banff. It’s set in 17th century Scotland, mainly in the town of Banff, where on a stormy night Patrick Davidson, the local apothecary’s assistant collapses in the street. The next morning he is found dead in the school house of Alexander Seaton, a failed minister, now a schoolteacher
My sixth link is about another schoolteacher, this time a headmistress, Miss Bulstrode in Agatha Christie’s novel Cat Among the Pigeons. She is the head of an exclusive and expensive girls’ school, Meadowbank, in England, said to be based on her daughter Rosalind’s school. Like Miss Brodie, Miss Bulstrode has built a reputation for excellence. But disaster strikes when two of the teachers, Miss Springer, the new Games Mistress and the History and German teacher, Miss Vansittart are murdered. Rather late in the day Hercules Poirot is called in to investigate their deaths.
My chain is mostly made up of two of my favourite genres, historical fiction and crime fiction. It went from a governess to a headmistress with murder mysteries in between. What is in your chain?
What are you currently reading? What did you recently finish reading? What do you think you’ll read next?
Currently I am reading Small Wars by Sadie Jones, a book I’ve had for years ( I bought it in 2011!). It’s historical fiction set mainly in Cyprus in the late 1950s where Major Hal Treherne and his wife Clara and their baby daughters are stationed during the ‘enosis’ (union with Greece) uprising. It’s tense, gripping and I’m now about halfway into the book and thinking I’ll have to stop reading my other book to concentrate on finishing this one.
That other book I’m currently reading is a NetGalley review copy of The Death of Shame by Ambrose Parry. This is also historical fiction, set in 1854 in Edinburgh, a mix of fact and fiction incorporating the social scene, historical and medical facts. It’s the 5th book in the Raven and Fisher Mystery series. Dr Will Raven is no longer working with Dr Simpson but is setting up his own medical practice with the financial assistance of Sarah Fisher. They are investigating the disappearance of Sarah’s young niece, the suicide of Will’s father in law and the blackmailing of Dr Simpson.
The last book I read was Brighton Rock by Graham Greene. This is set in the dark underworld of Brighton, where a gang war is raging. Seventeen year old gang leader Pinkie Brown, malign and ruthless, has killed a man. What follows is truly terrible, horrifying and full of violence. And yet I felt compelled to read it, fearful about how it would end. I’ll be writing more about it in a later post.
What will I read next? It could be All That Matters by Sir Chris Hoy, his memoir.
In elite sport, the margin between victory and defeat is miniscule, and the pressure is immense. Chris has built a glittering sporting career on understanding these how to feel for them, how to cope with them, how to make them count.
Last year, he faced another life-changing moment. He found out that the ache in his shoulder was in fact a tumour, and that he had Stage 4 cancer.
He will be living with this disease for the rest of his life.
Gripping, terrifying, an unputdownable read. Discover Graham Greene’s most iconic novel.
A gang war is raging through the dark underworld of Brighton. Seventeen-year-old Pinkie, malign and ruthless, has killed a man. Believing he can escape retribution, he is unprepared for the courageous, life-embracing Ida Arnold. Greene’s gripping thriller exposes a world of loneliness and fear, of life lived on the ‘dangerous edge of things.’
In this gripping, terrifying, and unputdownable read, discover Greene’s iconic tale of the razor-wielding Pinkie.
This has been on my Spin List for some while now, so it’s about time I read it.
“Why does this bleak, seething and anarchic novel still resonate? Its energy and power is that of the rebellious adolescent, foreshadowing the rise of the cult of youth in the latter part of the 20th century.”—The Guardian
Did you take part in the Classics Spin? What will you be reading?
Before next Sunday, 15 June 2025 create a post that lists twenty books of your choice that remain “to be read” on your Classics Club list. On that day the Classics Club will post a number from 1 through 20. The challenge is to read whatever book falls under that number on your Spin List by the 24 August 2025.
Here’s my list:
Here’s my list:
Emma by Jane Austen (a re-read)
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
The Case of the Gilded Fly by Edmund Crispin
Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens
Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle
Friends and Heroes by Olivia Manning
The Birds and other short stories by Daphne du Maurier
What are you currently reading? What did you recently finish reading? What do you think you’ll read next?
Currently I am reading The Boy With No Shoes: a Memoir by William Horwood, the author of The Duncton Chronicles an allegorical tale about the moles of Duncton Wood. It’s about his childhood in south-east England after the Second World War – the unwanted child of a mother who rejects him, and whose other children bully him.
I’m also reading The House of Lost Whispers by Jennie Kerr, a mix of historical fiction and magical realism. It begins in 1912 when thirteen-year-old Olivia goes to live at Merriford Manor with her guardians after her parents were drowned when the Titanic sank. She hears a voice through her bedroom wall. A voice from a man called Seth. At first she thinks he’s a ghost. But it soon becomes clear that he lives in an overlapping world that is just a shudder in time away from her own. I wasn’t too sure about the mix of genres, but it’s working well so far.
The last book I read was Bleak House by Charles Dickens, which is over 1000 pages full of description and lots of characters, about the complex and long-drawn out lawsuit of Jarndyce v Jarndyce. I’ll be writing more about it in a later post.
What will I read next? I’m thinking of reading The Curious Case of the Village in the Moonlight by Steve Wiley, a novella about Vincent Van Gogh. Van Gogh painted Starry Night whilst living in an asylum, near the village of Saint-Rémy, where a lamplighter is doing his rounds in the village. It will be his last round before electricity is installed during green hour — an absinthe-drenched celebration in his honour. The curious hour would transform the night from familiar to fantastical, with the village street lamps mysteriously vanishing.
But when the time comes I may find myself reading something different, as the mood takes me.
