Category: Six Degrees of Separation

Six Degrees of Separation from  Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos to Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

Published on by Margaret15 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.

This month we start with Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos first published in 1782 as Les Liaisons Dangereuses. I read this many years ago when I was taking an Open University course and I’ve not reviewed this on my blog. It’s an epistolary novel, told through the letters written by different characters to one another. I loved it. The Goodreads summary describes it as a:

novel of moral and emotional depravity is a disturbing and ultimately damning portrayal of a decadent society. Aristocrats and ex-lovers Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont embark on a sophisticated game of seduction and manipulation to bring amusement to their jaded lives. While Merteuil challenges Valmont to seduce an innocent convent girl, he is also occupied with the conquest of a virtuous married woman. Eventually their human pawns respond, and the consequences prove to be more serious—and deadly—than the players could have ever predicted.

My first link is Lady Susan by Jane Austen, which see wrote between 1794 and 1795, adding a conclusion in 1805, but not published until James Edward Austen-Leigh, her nephew, published it in his Memoir of Jane Austen in 1871.

Lady Susan is about Lady Susan Vernon, told in a series of letters, just like Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Both have manipulative and evil characters without any moral scruples, who delight in their power to seduce others. It’s the  story of an unscrupulous widow who plans to force her daughter into a marriage against her wishes. Lady Susan is an attractive and entertaining and totally wicked character, who nevertheless almost manages to fool people for some of the time at least. She is also trying to captivate her sister-in-law’s brother, whilst still holding on to the affections of a previous lover.

My second link is also a book of letters, but real letters, not fictional ones – Jane Austen’s Letters edited by Deirdre Le Faye, First published in 1932 in this edition Le Faye has added new material that has come to light since 1932, and reordered the letters into their correct chronological sequence. She provided new biographical, topographical and general indexes, annotation, and information on watermarks, postmarks and other physical details of the manuscripts. This gives a unique insight into the daily life of the novelist both intimate and gossipy, observant and informative. The letters bring Jane’s family and friends to life, as well as her surroundings and contemporary events. This is one of my TBRs, but I have dipped into it and read some of the letters.

For my third link I’m staying with Jane Austen with The Genius of Jane Austen: Her Love of Theatre and Why She Is a Hit in Hollywood by Paula Byrne, a radical look at Jane Austen as you’ve never seen her – as a lover of farce, comic theatre and juvenilia. It also looks at stage adaptations of Austen’s novels (including one called Miss Elizabeth Bennet by A. A. Milne) to modern classics, including the BBC Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, Emma Thompson’s Sense and Sensibility, and Clueless, adapted from Emma.

This book explores Jane Austen’s love of the theatre — she acted in amateur productions, frequently attended the theatre, and even scripted several early works in play form. Austen’s letters show, says Byrne, that she was steeped in theatre and that was a keen theatregoer, watching actors like Dora Jordan.

My fourth link is the theatre and Dora Jordan in Mrs Jordan’s Profession by Claire Tomalin, the biography of Dora Jordan who was acclaimed as the greatest comic actress of her day. Dora and the third son of George III, William, the Duke of Clarence , who, although not legally married, lived together as Mr and Mrs Bland.  She was known as ‘Mrs Jordan’, although there was never a Mr Jordan. She made her stage debut in 1777 at the age of 15 and her first Drury Lane appearance in 1785. The two met and she became his mistress in 1790. The book is packed with information, brilliantly bringing the late 18th and early 19th centuries to life as she tells the story of Dora and her relationship with the Duke of Clarence, later King William IV.

My fifth link is to George III in Alan Bennett’s The Madness of King George. This play premiered on 28 November 1991 and was made into a film in 1994. The introduction to the screenplay includes Bennett’s production diary, notes comparing his stage and screen versions, and the political background to the Court of George III. Also included are a selection of stills from the film. I’ve seen the 1994 film with Nigel Hawthorne as King George and Helen Mirren as Queen Charlotte, which I thought was excellent, but have not read the the book or the play itself.

My final link takes me back to Jane Austen’s books and also to Paula Byrne’s book The Genius of Jane Austen and the theatre. It’s Mansfield Park, which I read about 10 years ago. Fanny Price, as a child of 10 goes to live with her wealthy aunt and uncle, Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram at Mansfield Park. The younger members of the family, convert the library into a theatre and stage a risqué play called Lover’s Vows. I’ll be rereading Mansfield Park later on to refresh my memory and consider what it reveals about Jane Austen’s own views of the theatre in the light of Paula Byrne’s book.

The links in my chain are epistolary novels, Jane Austen’s letters and books, the theatre, and George III, using fiction and nonfiction.

What is in your chain, I wonder?

Next month (March 1, 2025), we’ll start with the 2023 Booker Prize winner, Prophet Song by Paul Lynch.

Six Degrees of Separation from Orbital by Samantha Newman to Bleak House by Charles Dickens

Published on by Margaret6 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.

This month starts with Orbital by Samantha Harvey, the 2024 Booker winner:

A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.

The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part – or protective – of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?

Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction.

My first link is The Western Wind by Samantha Harvey. I came to the end of this book and immediately wanted to start it again. What seems at first to be a simple tale is actually a multi-layered and complex book. I really enjoyed reading it. It’s set in the late 15th century in a small village in Somerset. A man disappears, presumed drowned – but how and why did he die?

My second link is a book also set in the 15th century, The Sunne in Splendour by Sharon Penman, a fascinating novel about Richard III’s life from his childhood to his death at Bosworth Field in 1485. I think this is one of the best historical novels that I’ve read. It is full of detail, but Sharon Penman’s research sits very lightly in this book, none of it feels like a history lesson, and it all brings Richard’s world to life.

I’m staying in the 15th century for my third link, Red Rose, White Rose by Joanna Hickson, set in 15th century England during the Wars of the Roses when Cecily Neville was torn between both sides. Her father was Richard Neville, the Duke of Westmorland and a staunch Lancastrian and she married Richard Plantagenet of York and became the mother of Edward IV and Richard III. Told through the eyes of Cicely and her half-brother Cuthbert, this is the story of one of the most powerful women in England during one of its most turbulent periods.

For my fourth link I’m using the words ‘white rose‘ in the title and moving from the 15th century to the 20th with White Rose, Black Forest by Eoin Dempsey, a World War 2 novel. It’s told from the perspective of a German who opposed the Nazis and is set in the Black Forest, Germany in 1943, where Franka Gerber is living alone in an isolated cabin, having returned to her home town of Freiburg after serving a prison sentence for anti-Nazi activities.

My fifth link is to another novel set in World War 2 – Checkmate to Murder by E C R Lorac, a Chief Inspector Robert Macdonald murder mystery. What I found fascinating in this book is the insight into what life was like in wartime London, complete with the London fog and the details of the blackout and although the Blitz was over there were still plenty of bangs and noise so that a gunshot wasn’t easily heard. 

For my final link I’m moving to London in the 19th century with Bleak House by Charles Dickens about the obscure case in the Court of Chancery of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. Here’s his description of fog in Chapter 1:

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ‘prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

My chain moves from the International Space Station to London in the 19th century and has travelled through the 15th century with a brief stop in the 20th century. The books are historical and crime fiction

What is in your chain, I wonder?

Next month (February 1, 2025), we’ll start with a classic – Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos.

Six Degrees of Separation from Sandwich by Catherine Newman to A Shilling for Candles by Josephine Tey

Published on by Margaret17 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.

This month starts with Sandwich by Catherine Newman, a book set in Cape Cod, described as a moving, hilarious story of a family summer vacation full of secrets, lunch, and learning to let go.

My first link is The Widow’s War by Sally Gunning. This is historical fiction set in 1761 about a whaler’s wife, Lyddie, in the Cape Cod village of Satucket in Massachusetts, living with the daily uncertainty that her husband Edward will simply not return. And when her worst fear is realised, she finds herself doubly cursed. She is overwhelmed by grief, and her property and rights are now legally in the hands of her nearest male relative: her daughter’s overbearing husband, whom Lyddie cannot abide. She decides to challenge both law and custom for control of her destiny, but she soon discovers the price of her bold “war” for personal freedom to be heartbreakingly dear.

My second link is a book about another widow, The Widow’s Tale by Mick Jackson. It’s narrated by the widow and is rather rambling as befits a woman in her sixties on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Her husband has died, she’s taken it badly, and goes to live in a rented cottage on the bleak Norfolk coast, shunning other people. She drinks to forget herself, sits in pubs alone, doing the crossword and reading a book to pass the time. She drives out to places she once knew, goes for solitary walks,  gets stuck in the saltmarshes, and is definitely quirky and obsessional.

Elly Griffith’s character, archaeologist Ruth Galloway also lives in a cottage on the Norfolk coast. So, My third link is The Janus Stone. Ruth is called in to investigate when builders, demolishing a large old house in Norwich, uncover the skeleton of a child – minus the skull – beneath a doorway. Is it some ritual sacrifice or just plain straightforward murder? The house was once a children’s home. When DCI Harry Nelson meets the Catholic priest who used to run it he tells him that two children did go missing forty years before – a boy and a girl. They were never found. When carbon dating proves that the child’s bones predate the children’s home, Ruth is drawn more deeply into the case. But as spring turns to summer it becomes clear that someone is trying very hard to put her off the scent by frightening her half to death…

More missing children are the subject of My fourth link. It’s On Beulah Height by Reginald Hill. When a child goes missing during one long, hot dry summer it reminds Dalziel of the three little girls who had gone missing 15 years earlier from the village of Dendale in Yorkshire just before it was flooded to provide a new reservoir. No bodies were ever found. Once again during another hot summer the waters of the reservoir recede and the old village re-emerges from the depths.

This book is tightly plotted with many twists that made me change my mind so many times I gave up trying to work out who the murderer was and just read for the pleasure of reading. Hill’s descriptive writing is rich and full of imagery.

There is a bird on the cover of On Beulah Height, so My fifth link is to another book with a bird on the cover – The Crow Trap by Ann Cleeves, the first Vera book. Rachael, Anne and Grace are all staying at Baikie’s an isolated cottage on the North Pennines whilst they carry out an environmental survey. When Rachael arrives at the cottage she is confronted by the body of her friend Bella Furness, who it appears has committed suicide. Then Grace is found dead and the mystery really begins and it is down to DI Vera Stanhope, to get to the bottom of the mystery. Vera is a great character and even though I do like Brenda Blethyn’s portrayal of her in the TV series, I prefer her as she is in the books –  a woman in her fifties, who looks like a bag lady. 

My final link is A Shilling for Candles by Josephine Tey in which Inspector Alan Grant also investigates an apparent suicide. A young and beautiful film star, Christine Clay was found dead beneath the cliffs of the south coast. But he soon discovers that it was in fact murder as a coat button was found twisted in her hair and he suspects a young man, Robin Tisdall who had been staying with Christine in a remote cottage near the beach, especially when it is revealed that she has named him as a beneficiary in her will. Tisdall has lost his coat and so the search is on to find it to prove either his innocence or guilt.

The books in my chain are mainly a mix of crime and historical fiction.

What is in your chain, I wonder?

Next month (January 4, 2025), we’ll start with the 2024 Booker winner, Orbital by Samantha Harvey.

Six Degrees of Separation from  Intermezzo by Sally Rooney to White Nights

Published on by Margaret8 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.

This month starts with Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. I haven’t read this book, so this is the description on Amazon UK:

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties – successful, competent and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women – his enduring first love Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude – a period of desire, despair and possibility – a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.

My first link is Thin Air, a novel by Michelle Paver also about two brothers. Kanchenjunga, the third highest mountain in the world, had claimed many lives and no one had reached the summit. Held to be a sacred mountain, it is one of the most dangerous mountains in the world – believed to be the haunt of demons and evil spirits. An unsuccessful attempt had been made in 1907, led by Edmund Lyell, when only two men had returned. The group in 1935, led by Major Cotterell, attempted to follow the 1907 route up the south-west face. Their story is narrated by medic, Dr. Stephen Pearce, accompanying his older brother, Kits. The brothers have always been rivals and this continues as they make their way up the mountain. Things start to go wrong almost straight away and Stephen is full of foreboding.

My second link is a book that also has ‘air’ in the title – Coming Up For Air, Sarah Leipciger’s second novel. It is a beautiful novel, a story of three people living in different countries and in different times. How their stories connect is gradually revealed as the novel progresses. As the author explains at the end of the novel it is a mix of fact and fiction and has its basis in truth. There is grief and loss and despair in each story, but above all, it is about love, and the desire to live. I think Sarah Leipciger is a great storyteller. It is an inspiring book, beautifully written, which emphasises the importance of the air we breathe and the desire to live. I read this book in June 2021.

My third link is An Officer and a Spy, historical fiction by Robert Harris, another book I read in June 2021. It is a gripping book about the Dreyfus affair in 1890s France. Alfred Dreyfus, a young Jewish officer, was convicted of treason by passing secrets to the Germans in 1895 and sent to solitary confinement on Devil’s Island. It’s narrated by Colonel George Picquart, who became convinced that Dreyfus was innocent. Harris goes into meticulous detail in staying accurate to the actual events, but even so this is a gripping book and I was completely absorbed by it from start to finish.

My fourth link is The Count of Monte Cristo, historical fiction by Alexandre Dumas, in which the main character is also wrongly imprisoned on an island. It begins in 1815 when Edmond Dantès, a sailor, having returned to Marseilles is wrongly accused of being a Bonapartist and imprisoned in the Chateau d’If on the Isle of Monte Cristo, for fourteen years. It’s a great story, action-packed, and full of high drama and emotion. Montecristo is a real island in the Tyrrhenian Sea, part of the Tuscan Archipelago, and administered by the municipality of Portoferraio in the province of Livorno.

So My fifth link is also set on a real island, that of the isolated island of Elliðaey off the coast of Iceland in Ragnar Jónasson’s novel The Island, a murder mystery with elements of horror. Four friends visit the island ten years after the murder of a fifth friend, Katla, but only three of them return. One of them, Klara, fell to her death from a cliff – but did she jump or was she pushed? Detective Inspector Hulda Hermannsdóttir is sent to investigate. A suspect had been charged, but had committed suicide before the verdict was announced and the case had been closed. But are the two murders connected, even though they are ten years apart? This book is the second in Jónasson’s Hidden Iceland series.

My final link is also the second book in a series, that is White Nights by Ann Cleeve, the second in her Shetland Quartet, featuring Detective Jimmy Perez. It’s set mainly in the village of Biddista, when Kenny Thomson finds a man’s body hanging in the hut where the boat owners of the village keep their lines and pots. At first it looks as though the man, his face covered by a clown’s mask, has committed suicide, but he’d been dead before he was strung up. As well as the mystery of who killed the man in the clown mask and why, there is also the disappearance 15 years earlier of Kenny’s older brother Lawrence. It was thought that he left the island after Bella had broken his heart. Kenny hadn’t heard from him since and at first thought the dead man could be him.

The books in my chain are mainly a mix of crime and historical fiction. And the chain has become a circle with the last book connecting to the starting book and the first book, all containing two brothers.

What is in your chain, I wonder?

Next month (December 7, 2024), we’ll start with a beach read – Sandwich by Catherine Newman.

Six Degrees of Separation from  Long Island by Colm Tóibín to Last Seen Wearing by Colin Dexter

Published on by Margaret17 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.

This month starts  with ColmTóibín’s Long Island, the sequel to Brooklyn. I haven’t read this book, so this is the description on Amazon UK:

A man with an Irish accent knocks on Eilis Fiorello’s door on Long Island and in that moment everything changes. Eilis and Tony have built a secure, happy life here since leaving Brooklyn – perhaps a little stifled by the in-laws so close, but twenty years married and with two children looking towards a good future.

And yet this stranger will reveal something that will make Eilis question the life she has created. For the first time in years she suddenly feels very far from home and the revelation will see her turn towards Ireland once again. Back to her mother. Back to the town and the people she had chosen to leave behind. Did she make the wrong choice marrying Tony all those years ago? Is it too late now to take a different path?

My first link is from the word ‘Island‘ in 100 Days on Holy Island by Peter Mortimer. The island is also known as Lindisfarne. This sense of being an outsider pervades the book. He always felt an ‘outsider’, not accepted by the locals. He wasn’t there as a tourist, nor had he gone to settle there, but he went with the intention of seeing how he coped with living there  for one hundred days and writing about it.

My second link is The Rising Tide by Ann Cleeves, the 10th Vera Stanhope mystery novel. It’s set on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne a tidal island just off the coast of Northumberland, only accessible across a causeway when the tide is out. DCI Vera Stanhope and her team investigate the death of Rick Kelsall who was discovered hanged from the rafters of his small bedroom on Holy Island. He is one of a group of friends who have met for a reunion each year on the island for the past fifty years

My third link is another book with the word ‘tide‘ in the title – A Dark and Twisted Tide by Sharon Bolton. This is such a terrifying novel, particularly if like me, you have a fear of drowning. Police Constable Lacey Flint thinks she’s safe. Living on the river, she’s never been happier. Until she finds a body floating on the surface, as she wild-swims in the Thames.

My fourth link is The Marlow Club Murder by Robert Thorogood a ‘cosy’ murder mystery. Seventy-seven year old Judith Potts is happy with her life, living in an Arts and Crafts mansion on the River Thames, although there are hints that there is something in her past she wants to forget. It’s the height of summer, in the grip of a heatwave, and Judith decides to take all her clothes off and go for swim in the Thames. She was enjoying herself when she hears a shout from her neighbour’s house on the opposite riverbank, followed by a gunshot. Later, when she goes to investigate, she finds him, dead in the river, with a bullet hole in the centre of his forehead. Judith is a crossword compiler, who writes cryptic clues.

So My fifth link is Puzzled: Secrets and Clues from a Life in Words by David Astle, a real life cryptic crossword compiler, a Melbourne-based writer of non-fiction, fiction and drama. He co-hosts Letters and Numbers (the Australian version of Countdown) as the dictionary expert, and his crosswords appear in Australian papers The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. Beginning with a Master Puzzle, he leads us through each of the clues, chapter by chapter, revealing the secrets of anagrams, double meanings, manipulations, spoonerisms and hybrid clues. More than a how-to manual and more than a memoir, Puzzled is a book for word junkies everywhere.

My final link is Last Seen Wearing by Colin Dexter the second book in the Inspector Morse books. Inspector Morse is perplexed when a letter of reassurance arrives from young Valerie Taylor, missing for more than two years and presumed dead, in a case that takes a bizarre turn when a mysterious body turns up. This book, like all of Dexter’s books, is a most complicated mystery, one of the ‘puzzle’ types. Dexter, himself, constructed crossword puzzles and made Morse a crossword aficionado. Morse is puzzled by this case, his brain seething in ceaseless turmoil, until he realised that if he shuffled the suspects and possibilities like the letters in an anagram the answer would come to him.

The books in my chain are a mix of crime fiction novels, and non fiction (Puzzled and 100 Days on Holy island). What is in your chain, I wonder?

Next month (November 2, 2024), we’ll start with Sally Rooney’s latest release, Intermezzo.

Six Degrees of Separation from  After Story by Larissa Behrendt to The Butterfly Room by Lucinda Riley

Published on by Margaret9 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.

This month starts  After Story by Larissa Behrendt. This is the description on Amazon UK:

When Indigenous lawyer Jasmine decides to take her mother, Della, on a tour of England’s most revered literary sites, Jasmine hopes it will bring them closer together and help them reconcile the past. Twenty-five years earlier the disappearance of Jasmine’s older sister devastated their tight-knit community. This tragedy returns to haunt Jasmine and Della when another child mysteriously goes missing on Hampstead Heath. As Jasmine immerses herself in the world of her literary idols – including Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters and Virginia Woolf – Della is inspired to rediscover the wisdom of her own culture and storytelling. But sometimes the stories that are not told can become too great to bear. Ambitious and engrossing, After Story celebrates the extraordinary power of words and the quiet spaces between. We can be ready to listen, but are we ready to hear?

My first link is using the word Story, in the title, and it’s also a book about storytelling – The Story Keeper, set on the Isle of Skye in 1857, by Anna Mazzola. It stresses the importance of folk tales – stories that have been told to make sense of the world and reflect people’s strengths, flaws, hopes and fears. 

My second link is The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton, a story moving between time periods from 2011, back to the 1960s and also to the 1940s. It begins in 1961 in Suffolk when sixteen-year old Laurel is shocked when she sees her mother stabbing a stranger who had come to their farm. 

In my third link another sixteen year old girl, Nouf ash-Shrawi, disappears from her home in Jeddah, in The Night of the Mi’raj by Zoë Ferraris, just before her arranged marriage. Her body is eventually found in a desert wadi. It appears that her death was an accident and that she died by drowning in the wadi after a sudden storm.

My fourth link is Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday about a project to introduce salmon fishing in the waters of the Wadi Aleyn in the heart of the mountains of Heraz, in Yemen.

My fifth link takes the chain from the mountains of Heraz to the Appalachian Mountains in Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver in which a young mother discovers a beautiful and terrible marvel of nature: the monarch butterflies have not migrated south for the winter that year.

My final link is to The Butterfly Room by Lucinda Riley. The story revolves around Posy Montague and her family home, Admiral House in the Suffolk countryside. Her father encouraged her to draw plants and showed her how to catch butterflies. As a child Posy thought The Butterfly Room in the Folly in the grounds of Admiral House  looked like a fairy-tale castle with its turret made of yellow sandy brick. But the Folly was not the wonderful place she imagined – and there is a dark secret hidden behind its locked door.

The books in my chain are all fiction including historical fiction, mysteries and crime fiction. The chain travels through Australia, the UK, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and the USA,

Next month (October 5, 2024), we’ll start with Colm Tóibín’s Long Island.