Six Degrees of Separation

Six Degrees of Separation from In the Heart of the Sea to West with Giraffes

Published on January 3, 2026 by Margaret8 Comments

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.

Six Degrees of Separation from Seascraper to

Published on December 6, 2025December 7, 2025 by Margaret15 Comments

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 a novella – Seascraper by Benjamin Wood, a book I haven’t read.

Going off the book cover of a gloomy seaside scene, with the sun barely visible through the grey mist this I think this cannot be a cheerful seaside story and the description on Amazon adds to that impression. It describes it as ‘the story of a young man hemmed in by his circumstances, striving to achieve fulfilment far beyond the world he knows.’

Usually I try to vary my links, but this month I decided to make this chain with all my links having the word sea in the title, beginning with The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch, another book that does not have a happy picture of life by the sea. In it Charles Appleby an ageing actor, moves to a house by the sea and slowly ruins his life and of those around him. The sea is itself a character, sometimes calm and peaceful and at other times raging and storm swept, full of monsters and high drama. I read it many years ago when I had time off work with the flu and I remember being drawn feverishly into the narrative.

The next book in my chain is also a book about how dangerous the sea can be. It’s The Sea Change by Joanna Rossiter as a tsunami sweeps through Kanyakumari, in Southern India separating Alice from her new husband, James and in danger of drowning, she desperately searches for him. The story is a dual time novel told alternately by Alice and Violet, her mother. After the dramatic opening scenes it then moves immediately to Imber in 1971 as Violet returns to Imber and recalls how they were forced to leave, clinging to Imber ‘as if it were a lost soul.‘

The power of the sea is evident in The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. The sea in this book is deep and treacherous.This is the story of an old Cuban fisherman and his supreme ordeal: a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream.

The next book in my chain is The Sea Detective by Mark Douglas-Home. Cal McGill is an oceanographer, who uses his knowledge of the tides, wind speeds and data on ocean currents to track human bodies and sea-borne objects. Megan Bates, had last been seen walking into the sea. Her body had never been found and it had been assumed after her bag and hat had drifted ashore that she had drowned herself.

A Sea of Troubles by Donna Leon is about the deaths of two fishermen off the island of Pellestrina, south of the Lido on the Venetian lagoon, when their boat suddenly exploded. Fishing is the primary source of income on Pellestrina and alongside the inner side of the thin peninsular are scores of vongolari, the clam fishing boats. Leon also highlights the pollution and the overfishing of clams that is destroying the clam beds.

I’m completing my chain with In the Heart of the Sea The Epic True Story That Inspired Moby Dick by Nathaniel Philbrick, a nonfiction book, 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. It’s full of detail about whales and the Nantucket whalers. It’s described as ‘lmpeccably researched and beautifully told, the book delivers the ultimate portrait of man against nature, drawing on a remarkable range of archival and modern sources, including a long-lost account by the ship’s cabin boy.’

Next month (January 3, 2026) is a wildcard to begin the year. Start with the book you finished this month’s chain with (or, if you didn’t participate in December, begin with the last book you read).

Six Degrees of Separation from We Have Always Lived in the Castle to Ryan’s Christmas

Published on November 1, 2025 by Margaret11 Comments

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 We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson is a fantastic book; a weirdly wonderful book about sisters, Merricat and Constance. They live in a grand house, away from the village, behind locked gates, feared and hated by the villagers. Merricat is an obsessive-compulsive, both she and Constance have rituals that they have to perform in an attempt to control their fears. Merricat is a most unreliable narrator.

I’m starting my chain with The Lottery is a short story also written by Shirley Jackson. It was first published on June 25, 1948, in The New Yorker, (the link takes you to the story.) The lottery is an annual rite, in which a member of a small farming village is selected by chance. This is a creepy story of casual cruelty, which I first read several years ago. The shocking consequence of being selected in the lottery is revealed only at the end.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark, was first published in The New Yorker magazine on 14th October 1961. It is perhaps Muriel Spark’s most famous novel about the ‘Brodie set’. But which one of them causes her downfall and her loss of pride and self-absorption? What really impresses me about this book is the writing, so compact, so perceptive and so in control of the shifts in time backwards and forwards. It’s a joy to read.

Another book that was a joy to read is Miss Austen by Gill Hornby. This is the untold story of the most important person in Jane’s life – her sister Cassandra. After Jane’s death, Cassandra lived alone and unwed, spending her days visiting friends and relations and quietly, purposefully working to preserve her sister’s reputation. Cassandra is convinced that her own and Jane’s letters to Eliza Fowle, the mother of Cassandra’s long-dead fiancé, are still somewhere in the vicarage. Eventually she finds the letters and confronts the secrets they hold, secrets not only about Jane but about Cassandra herself. Will Cassandra reveal the most private details of Jane’s life to the world, or commit her sister’s legacy to the flames?

My next link is also a book in which letters play a key part. It’s The ABC Murders by Agatha Christie, a Golden Age of Detective Fiction novel first published in 1936. A series of murders are advertised in advance in letters to Poirot, and signed by an anonymous ‘ABC’. An ABC Railway guide is left next to each of the bodies. So the first murder is in Andover, the victim a Mrs Alice Ascher; the second in Bexhill, where Betty Barnard was murdered; and then Sir Carmichael Clarke in Churston is found dead. The police are completely puzzled and Poirot gets the victims’ relatives together to see what links if any can be found. Why did ABC commit the murders and why did he select Poirot as his adversary?

Another Golden Age murder mystery published in 1936 is Death at the President’s Lodging by Michael Innes. This is essentially a ‘locked room’ mystery. Dr Umpleby, the unpopular president of St Anthony’s College (a fictional college similar to an Oxford college) is found in his study, shot through the head. His head was swathed in a black academic gown, a human skull beside his body and surrounding it, little piles of human bones. Inspector Appleby from Scotland Yard is in charge of the investigation, helped by Inspector Dodd from the local police force.

Innes’s writing is intellectual, detailed, formal and scattered with frequent literary allusions and quotations. The plot is complex and in the nature of a puzzle. There are plenty of characters, the suspects being the dons of the college.

And my final link is Ryan’s Christmas by L J Ross, another ‘locked room mystery’. DCI Ryan, and DS Phillips and their wives are stranded in Chillingham Castle when a snowstorm forces their car off the main road and into the remote heart of Northumberland. Cut off from the outside world by the snow, with no transport, mobile signals or phone lines they join the guests who had booked a ‘Candlelit Ghost Hunt’. Then Carole Black, the castle’s housekeeper is found dead lying in the snow, stabbed through the neck. There’s only one set of footpaths in the snow, and those are Carole’s, so who committed the murder?

My chain includes books by the same author, books first published in the same magazine, letters, Golden Age murder mysteries, and ‘locked room’ mysteries.

‘Next month (December 6, 2025), we’ll start with a novella that you may read as part of this year’s Novellas in November – Seascraper by Benjamin Wood.

Six Degrees of Separation from Ghost Cities by Siang Lu to 4.50 from Paddington

Published on September 7, 2025 by Margaret7 Comments

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.

I’ve been away so this post is a little late!

This month we start with Ghost Cities by Siang Lu , the winner of the 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award, This is Amazon’s description:

Ghost Cities – inspired by the vacant, uninhabited megacities of China – follows multiple narratives, including one in which a young man named Xiang is fired from his job as a translator at Sydney’s Chinese Consulate after it is discovered he doesn’t speak a word of Chinese and has been relying entirely on Google Translate for his work.

How is his relocation to one such ghost city connected to a parallel odyssey in which an ancient Emperor creates a thousand doubles of Himself? Or where a horny mountain gains sentience? Where a chess-playing automaton hides a deadly secret? Or a tale in which every book in the known Empire is destroyed – then re-created, page by page and book by book, all in the name of love and art?

Allegorical and imaginative, Ghost Cities will appeal to readers of Haruki Murakami and Italo Calvino.

My First link is a book by Italo Calvino – If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, which I borrowed from the library a few years ago. It’s composed of stories of menace, spies, mystery, premonition—with explorations of how and why we choose to read, make meanings, and get our bearings or fail to. It has an excellent beginning but as I read on all the stops and starts became disjointed. I renewed it a few times but eventually I decided to abandon it and returned it unfinished.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell is my second link because it is a book I abandoned three times before trying it again, after watching the movie, which is fantastic – a kaleidoscope of visual delights, the scenery, the settings and the costumes are blazes of colour and drama. Cloud Atlas covers a time period from the 19th century to a post apocalyptic future. It is an amazing creation (‘amazing‘ is a very overused word, but in this instance very apt), at times confusing and at times brilliant.

My Third link is also by David Mitchell. It’s Slade House, a book I loved as soon as I started reading it. It’s a mixture of a ghost story, science fiction and horror. Something nasty happens every nine years at the end of October at Slade House. I read it as a fantasy, something that I couldn’t believe could ever happen (or at least, I hope not). People are invited or are drawn into Slade House and find themselves in a strange and dangerous situation, and there is no way out.

Which brings me to my fourth link House of Silence by Linda Gillard, a novel about families and their secrets – in particular one family, the Donovans. When Gwen Rowland meets Alfie Donovan she becomes interested in his family and persuades him to let her spend Christmas with them at the family home, Creake Hall, an old Elizabethan manor house. It raises issues of memory and identity, mental illness, loss and love.

Mental illness is my Fifth link in The Tree of Hands by Ruth Rendell, one of her best standalone books. When Benet was about fourteen, she and Mopsa, her psychologically disturbed mother had been alone in a train carriage, when Mopsa, had tried to stab her with a carving knife. It’s a psychological thriller, full of suspense, with several twists and turns that made me unsure how it would end. I was delighted by the final twist!

Agatha Christie wrote several books featuring trains. My sixth link is one of those books, 4.50 from Paddington. This begins when Mrs McGillicuddy was going home from Christmas shopping in London when she saw from the window of her train a murder being committed in a train travelling on a parallel line. But nobody believes her because there is no trace of a body and no one is reported missing. Nobody, that is except for her friend Miss Marple. But she is getting older and more feeble and she hasn’t got the physical strength to get about and do things as she would like. So, she enlists the help of Lucy Eyelesbarrow.

My chain is made up of books I abandoned books and books I loved. It’s taken me from a book about megacities in China to a murder mystery on a London train.

What is in your chain?

Next month (October 4, 2025), we’ll start with Dominic Amerena’s novel about authors and publishing, I Want Everything.

Six Degrees of Separation from The Safekeep by Yael Van Der Wouden to Cat Among the Pigeons

Published on August 2, 2025 by Margaret21 Comments

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 link Exit 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?

Next month (September 6, 2025), we’ll start with the winner of the 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award, Ghost Cities by Siang Lu.

Six Degrees of Separation from Theory and Practice to The Night Hawks

Published on July 5, 2025 by Margaret27 Comments

This month we start with Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser, the winner of the Stella Prize for Fiction 2025, praised for its innovative structure and exploration of young love, jealousy, and literary inheritance. I’ve not read it but it looks interesting. This is Amazon’s description:

It’s 1986, and ‘beautiful, radical ideas’ are in the air. A young woman arrives in Melbourne to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In bohemian St Kilda, she meets artists, activists, students – and Kit. He claims to be in a ‘deconstructed’ relationship, and they become lovers. Meanwhile, a dismaying discovery throws her work on ‘the Woolfmother’ into disarray.

Theory & Practice is a mesmerising account of desire and jealousy, truth and shame. It makes and unmakes fiction as we read, expanding our notion of what a novel can contain. Michelle de Kretser, one of Australia’s most celebrated writers, bends fiction, essay and memoir into exhilarating new shapes to uncover what happens when life smashes through the boundaries of art..

I’ve read some of Virginia Woolf’s books, including my first link: Orlando, a fictionalised biography of Vita Sackville-West, based on her life. It tells the tale of an extraordinary individual who lives through centuries of English history, first as a man, then as a woman. This is a book steeped in history showing how the passage of time had changed both the landscape and climate of England along with its society. There are many vivid passages – such as her description of the ‘Great Frost’ of 1608, when the Thames was frozen for six weeks and Frost Fairs were held on the ice.

Second link: There have been several Frost Fairs over the centuries. Another one in 1669 is described in Edward Marston’s The Frost Fair, the fourth in the Christopher Redmayne Restoration series about an architect and Jonathan Bale, a parish constable. They are both visiting the fair when one of Bale’s sons gets into trouble on thin ice. They rescue the boy but in the process make a grim discovery – the frozen corpse of a man. The dead man is Jeronimo Maldini, an Italian fencing master who has been missing for some time. Redmayne is inclined to dismiss the case and leave the investigation to Bale; but all that changes when his own brother, Henry Redmayne, is charged with the murder.

Third link: The first Christopher Redmayne book is The King’s Evil set in London in September 1666, just as the Great Fire of London has begun, eventually devastating a large part of the old medieval City of London. It’s also a murder mystery. Redmayne is working to restore London after the Fire, when he becomes involved in investigating the murder of Sir Ambrose Northcott. whose body was found in the cellars of his partly built new house.

Which links nicely to my fourth link about another architect, Cat (Catherine) Hakesby: The Royal Secret by Andrew Taylor set in 1670. This is the 5th book in the Marwood and Lovett series. After designing a poultry house for the young daughter of Lord Arlington, the Secretary of State, Cat Hakesby (formerly Lovett) gains a commission to design one for Charles II’s sister, ‘Minette,’ the Duchess of Orléans. This is a complicated book, as Marwood is investigating the mysterious death of Richard Abbott, one of Lord Arlington’s men. It’s full of political intrigue, danger and conspiracy, involving witchcraft, poisonings, and tricky international relationships.

My Fifth link is conspiracy, which brings me to Agatha Christie’s They Came to Baghdad. Set in 1950 this is a story about international espionage and conspiracy. The heads of the ‘great powers‘ are secretly meeting in Baghdad, where if it all goes wrong ‘the balloon will go up with a vengeance.’ And an underground criminal organisation is out to make sure it does go wrong, aiming at ‘total war – total destruction. And then – the new Heaven and the new Earth.’ Victoria Jones, a short-hand typist, a courageous girl with a ‘natural leaning towards adventure’ and a tendency to tell lies gets involved after meeting with a young man, Edward, who is going out to Baghdad the following day to join an archaeological dig.

My sixth link is archaeology in The Night Hawks by Elly Griffiths. Ruth Galloway is now Head of the Department of Archaeology at her old university, the fictional University of North Norfolk. The body of a young man who Detective Chief Inspector Nelson guesses is an illegal immigrant, an asylum seeker, is found on the beach at Blakeney Point. Then a skeleton, buried in a mound of what appears to be Bronze Age weapons, is also discovered on the beach by the group known as the Night Hawks when they were searching for buried treasure. Ruth, however is more interested in the hoard of Bronze Age weapons.

My chain is mostly made up of two of my favourite genres, historical fiction and crime fiction. What is in your chain?

Next month (August 5, 2025), we’ll start with the 2025 Women’s Prize winner, The Safekeep by Yael Van Der Wouden.