Six Degrees of Separation – Page 2

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

Published on November 1, 2025 by Margaret11 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 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.

Six Degrees of Separation from All Fours to Sausage Hall

Published on June 7, 2025 by Margaret25 Comments

This month we start with All Fours by Miranda July, shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2025 and several other awards. I haven’t read it and probably won’t. This is Amazon’s description:

A semi-famous artist turns forty-five and gives herself a gift – a cross-country road trip from LA to New York, without her husband and child. But thirty minutes after setting off, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel – and embarks on the journey of a lifetime.

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.

First link: I have read another book that was shortlisted for the previous year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction – Restless Dolly Maunder by Kate Grenville.

Dolly Maunder is born at the end of the 19th century, when society’s long-locked doors are just starting to creak ajar for determined women. Growing up in a poor farming family in rural New South Wales, Dolly spends her life doggedly pushing at those doors. A husband and two children do not deter her from searching for love and independence.

This is the fictionalised life story of Kate Grenville’s maternal grandmother, Sarah Catherine Maunder, known as Dolly. She was not only restless but also clever and determined – she knew what she wanted and she did her best to achieve it.

Second link: One of my favourite books by Kate Grenville is One Life: My Mother’s Story, her biography of Nance Russell, based on Nance’s memories, making it much more than a factual account of a person’s life. It’s a book that casts light not only on Nance’s life but also on life in Australia for most of the 20th century. Nance was born in 1912 and died in 2002, so she lived through two World Wars, an economic depression and a period of great social change. Nance wasn’t famous, the daughter of a rural working-class couple who became pub-keepers, but she was a remarkable woman.

It’s a vivid portrait of a real woman, a woman of great strength and determination, who had had a difficult childhood, who persevered, went to University, became a pharmacist, opened her own pharmacy, brought up her children, and helped build the family home. She faced sex discrimination and had to sell her pharmacy in order to look after her children at home.

Third link: Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang, a family memoir – the story of three generations of women in Jung Chang’s family – her grandmother, mother and herself, telling of their lives in China up to and during the years of the violent Cultural Revolution. Her family suffered atrociously, her father and grandmother both dying painful deaths and both her mother and father were imprisoned and tortured. She casts light on why and how Mao was able to exercise such paralysing control over the Chinese people. His magnetism and power was so strong and coupled with his immense skill at manipulation and his ability to inspire fear, it proved enough to subdue the spirit of most of the population; not to mention the absolute cruelty, torture and hardships they had to endure.

My fourth link moves from a memoir to crime fiction in Death of a Red Heroine by Qiu Xiaolong, the first book featuring Chief Inspector Chen. Chen is a reluctant policeman, he has a degree in English literature and is a published poet and translator. This is as much historical fiction as it is crime fiction. There is so much in it about China, its culture and its history before 1990 – the Communist regime and then the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s – as well as the changes brought about in the 1990s after the massacre of Tiananmen Square. This does interfere with the progress of the murder investigation as Chen has to cope with the political ramifications and consequently there are several digressions and the pace is slow and lacking tension. As Chen is a poet as well as a policeman there are also references to Chinese literature.

Fifth link: Another fictional Chief Inspector who writes poetry is Adam Dalgleish in The Murder Room by P D James. The Murder Room itself is in the Dupayne Museum, displaying the most notorious murder cases of the 1920s and 30s, with contemporary newspaper reports of the crimes and trials, photographs and actual exhibits from the scenes of the murders. These were actual crimes and not fictional cases made up by P D James.

The novel begins, as Adam Dalgleish visits the Dupayne in the company of his friend Conrad Ackroyd who is writing a series of articles on murder as a symbol of its age. A week later the first body is discovered at the Museum and Adam and his colleagues in Scotland Yard’s Special Investigation Squad are called in to investigate the killing, which appears to be a copycat murder of one of the 1930s’ crimes.

Another crime fiction writer with the surname James is my sixth link: Sausage Hall by Christina James, the third novel in the DI Yates series. It has a sinister undercurrent exploring the murky world of illegal immigrants, and a well researched historical element. It’s set in the South Lincolnshire Fens and is an intricately plotted crime mystery, uncovering a crime from the past whilst investigating a modern day murder. Sausage Hall is home to millionaire Kevan de Vries, grandson of a Dutch immigrant farmer. I liked the historical elements of the plot and the way Christina James connects the modern and historical crimes, interwoven with the history of Kevan’s home, Laurieston House, known to the locals as ‘Sausage Hall’ and the secrets of its cellar.

My chain is made up of novels shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, a biography, a memoir and three murder mysteries. It travels from New York to the UK via Australia and China.

Where does your chain end up, I wonder?

Next month (July 5, 2025), we’ll start with the 2025 Stella Prize winner, Michelle de Kretser’s work of autofiction, Theory & Practice.

Six Degrees of Separation from Rapture to Persuasion

Published on May 3, 2025May 3, 2025 by Margaret27 Comments

This month we start with Rapture by Emily Maguire. The motherless child of an English priest living in ninth-century Mainz, Agnes is a wild and brilliant girl with a deep, visceral love of God. At eighteen, to avoid a future as a wife or nun, Agnes enlists the help of a lovesick Benedictine monk to disguise herself as a man and secure a place at the revered Fulda monastery.

I haven’t read it and hadn’t heard of the author. According to a review in The Guardian she writes fiction and nonfiction and was shortlisted for the Stella prize, the Miles Franklin and book of the year at the Australian Book Industry awards for An Isolated Incident her 2016 novel. ‘In Rapture, her seventh novel, she turns her hand to historical fiction. Drawing inspiration from the life of Pope Joan, the woman who (according to legend) disguised herself as a man and served as pope for two years during the middle ages, Maguire examines questions of faith using the language of the body.’

I’ve had several false starts with this month’s chain, none of which I could complete. In the end I decided to start with another book about a pope, especially as the Roman Catholic Cardinals will start the procedure to elect a new pope on May 7.

It’s Conclave by Robert Harris. I always learn a lot from reading Harris’s books. In this one he describes the procedure to elect a new pope. Cardinal Lomeli, the Dean of the College of Cardinals leads the 118 Cardinals through the voting stages. I felt as though I was a fly on the wall watching it throughout as the Cardinals are locked inside the Sistine Chapel, isolated from contact with the outside world. Harris has thoroughly researched the subject and seamlessly woven the facts into the novel. He visited the locations used during a Conclave that are permanently closed to the public and interviewed a number of prominent Catholics including a cardinal who had taken part in a Conclave, as well as consulting many reports and books.

The next book is another one by Robert Harris The Fear Index , a fast-paced story set in the world of high finance and computer technology, which is way out of my comfort zone. It’s about scientist Dr Alex Hoffman, who together with his partner Hugo Quarry, an investment banker, runs a hedge fund based in Geneva, that makes billions. Alex has developed a revolutionary form of artificial intelligence that tracks human emotions, enabling it to predict movements in the financial markets. It’s built around the standard measure of market volatility: the VIX or ‘Fear Index’. But I learnt a bit about hedge funds and how they operate, although I got lost in the computer technology details.

My third link is A Climate of Fear by Fred Vargas, 9th Commissaire Adamsberg book. I like Adamsberg; he’s original, a thinker, who doesn’t like to express his feelings, but mulls things over. He’s an expert at untangling mysteries, an invaluable skill in this, one of the most complicated and intricate mysteries I’ve read, involving a woman found bleeding to death in her bath, having apparently committed suicide, a strange symbol that appears at subsequent death scenes, and a secretive society studying and re-enacting scenes from the French Revolution.

My fourth link is The Potter’s Hand by A N Wilson. it begins in 1768 and roughly follows the fortunes of the Wedgwood family until 1805, 10 years after the death of Josiah Wedgwood, an English potter and the founder of the Wedgwood company. For me it really did convey what it must have been like to live in that period – whilst the American War of Independence, and the French Revolution, were taking place. It’s full of ideas about colonialism, the abolition of slavery, working conditions, and women’s rights. There are many characters who come in and out of the narrative along the way, both fictional and historical, including Voltaire, George Stubbs (who painted the Wedgwood family portrait) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

My fifth link is Voltaire’s Candide or Optimism, a small book I read many years ago. Candide was the most brilliant challenge to the idea endemic in Voltaire’s day, that ‘all is for the best in the best possible worlds‘.In Candide he whisks his young hero and friends through a ludicrious variety of tortures, tragedies and reversals of fortune, in the company of Pangloss, a ‘matapysico-theologo-cosmolo-nigologist’ of unflinching optimism. The result is one of the glories of the eighteenth-century satire. (Taken from the description on the back cover.)

And my final link is Persuasion by Jane Austen. I read this first at school, when I was 17 for A Level GCE. It’s her last novel of missed opportunities and second chances centred on Anne Elliot, no longer young and with few romantic prospects. Eight years earlier, she was persuaded by others to break off her engagement to poor, handsome naval Captain Frederick Wentworth. ‘Set in the fashionable societies of Lyme Regis and Bath, Persuasion is a brilliant satire of vanity and pretension, and a mature, tender love story tinged with heartache.’ (Amazon) I’ll be re-reading it later in the year taking part with Brona at This Reading Life in her Austen 2025 project to reread her books, along with the Classics Club’s Sync Read (or readalong).

I certainly never thought I’d end my chain with Persuasion – but here it is! From Rapture to Persuasion in six moves. The links are the pope, books by Robert Harris, fear, the French Revolution, Voltaire and satire.

What is in your chain, I wonder?

Next month (June 7, 2025), we’ll start with Kate’s pick the 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction All Fours by Miranda July.