Category: Six Degrees of Separation

Six Degrees of Separation is 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’s chain begins with Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies.  I haven’t read it but apparently it is a novel about a marriage.

So my first book in the chain is also a book about a married couple. It is Before the Fact by Francis Iles. First published in 1932 this is a Golden Age crime fiction novel that is a psychological character study of its two main characters, Lina and Johnnie.  ‘Some women give birth to murderers, some go to bed with them, and some marry them. Lina Aysgarth had lived with her husband for nearly eight years before she realized that she was married to a murderer.’

The Marriage Lie by Kimberly Belle is another psychological thriller and is also about a marriage. Iris thought her marriage to Will was perfect until a plane en route to Seattle crashed. Everyone on board was killed and, according to the airline, Will was one of the passengers – but he had told her he was going to Florida. Why did he lie? This is one of those books that gripped me and kept me guessing all the way through. It has one of the most convoluted and complex plots I’ve read in a while. The pace is terrific and the tension just builds and builds.

Wreckage by Emily Bleeker is also about a plane crash. Lillian Linden and Dave Hall spent two years on a deserted island in the South Pacific after their plane crashed into the sea. Like The Marriage Lie, this book revolves around lies. After their rescue Lillian and Dave are desperate to keep what really happened on the island a secret from their families. This is also a book about marriage.

Wreckage leads to the next book in the chain in which the sea and an island play a major role. It’s The Sea Detective by Mark Douglas-Hume (a Scottish author) set on the fictional island of Eilean Iasgaich. Cal McGill uses his knowledge of tides, winds and currents to solve mysteries, which helps in the investigation of the appearance of severed feet in trainers that had been washed on shore on islands miles apart.

The Ghosts of Altona is also by a Scottish author – Craig Russell. It’s the 7th book featuring Jan Fabel, the head of Hamburg’s Murder Commission and is set in Altona, one of the city boroughs. It’s a modern Gothic tale as well as being a crime thriller. Fabel’s first case as a detective is resurrected when the body of Monika Krone is found under a car park, fifteen years after she disappeared. And then there are more murders which Fabel thinks are linked to the discovery of Monika’s remains, all of men who were in the same Gothic set at university.

Ghosts are the last link in the chain with The Graveyard Book  by Neil Gaiman. This is the story of the baby who escapes a murderer intent on killing his entire family, and who stumbles into the local disused graveyard where he is rescued by ghosts. He is named by the ghosts, Nobody Owens, or Bod for short, and he grows up looked after by his adoptive parents Master and Mistress Owens who had been dead for a few hundred years and numerous other occupants of the graveyard. It’s scary and creepy, but never gory.

The links are that they are all mysteries of different types, with three of them about marriage. They are all about life and death and the fight between good and evil. And I had no idea when I began the chain that it would end in a ghostly graveyard.

Next month (March 4, 2017), the chain will begin with Nick Hornby’s memoir (or love letter to soccer), Fever Pitch – I think I have this book, but haven’t read it.

Six Degrees of Separation is 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’s chain begins with:

When I read Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro in 2006 I thought it was very chilling and disturbing in its implications. I didn’t know what it was all about before I read it, so when I realised it quite took my breath away. I noted this quotation ‘… you’ve been told and not been told.’ And as I don’t want to give away the plot all I’m saying is that this book is about love, friendship and memory.

My first book is another book by  Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day, a book that I liked much more than Never Let Me Go. I read it years ago and have also seen the film of the book, with Anthony Hopkins as Stevens, the aging butler at Darlington Hall, looking back on his life. It’s a sad and moving book about life between the two World Wars. Stevens reminisces about his relationship with Darlington Hall’s housekeeper, Miss Kenton and his unspoken feelings for her.

Another book with the word ‘day’ in the title is The Day of the Lie by William Broderick. This is the fourth of his Father Anselm books – a series I love, although this is not my favourite book of the series. It is set in post-Second World War Poland, covering  the early 1950s, the early 1980s and the present day. Father Anselm’s old friend John has asked him to investigate who had betrayed  Roza Mojeska. She had been part of an underground resistance movement, had been arrested and tortured by the secret police. Like his other books this is a complicated and layered book, delving into the past, uncovering secrets and revealing crimes.

Schindler’s List by Thomas Keneally is also set in Poland – Nazi-occupied Poland during the Second World War. I haven’t read this book yet, although I have watched the film directed by Steven Spielberg more than once. It’s an unforgettable story, all the more extraordinary for being true. Oskar Schindler, a German business man risked his life to protect and save the lives of more than a thousand Jews. The book based on numerous eyewitness accounts. It won the Booker Prize in 1982.

The Secret River by Kate Grenville was  shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2006. It completely captivated me when I read it in 2012. It’s historical fiction  following the life of William Thornhill from his childhood in the slums of London to Australia. He was a Thames waterman transported for stealing timber in 1806. It’s about his struggle for survival after he was pardoned and became a waterman on the Hawkesbury River and then a settler with his own land and servants. It’s beautifully written and raises several issues ‘“ about crime and punishment, about landownership, defence of property, power, class and colonisation.

Another book set in Australia, but this time in the present day is Standing Water by Terri Armstrong. It’s a fascinating story set in and near the fictional town of Marrup in the Western Australia Wheatbelt, an area suffering from drought ‘“ there’s been no rain for a couple of years. I was completely engrossed in this book, which is about friendships, sibling rivalry, parent/child relationships, and love and betrayal. The characters are convincing and the setting is superb. I could feel the heat, see the landscape, the farms, the plants, birds and the Dog Rock, a huge rock overlooking a panorama of flat land below its sixty foot height, with tiny caves at its base.

Which leads me to A Fear of Dark Water by Craig Russell, the last link in the chain. The water in this book is the result of a massive storm that hit Hamburg, flooding the city, just as a major environmental summit is about to start. This is crime fiction – a serial rapist and murderer is still at large in the city and when the flood waters recede a headless torso is found washed up. I thoroughly enjoyed this fast paced and complex, multi-layered crime novel that kept me guessing right to the end.

From Never Let Me Go to A Fear of Dark Water took me from a disturbing view of the future to a disturbing view of the present via the UK, Poland, Australia and Germany. Where does your chain take you?