Category: Six Degrees of Separation

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.

The starting book this month is Hydra by Adriane Howell, a book on the Stella Prize 2023 shortlist and a book I haven’t read. This review in the Guardian describes it as an elegant debut, sinuous and strange – a slow-burn gothic thriller spiked with antiques and Freud, and partly set on the Mornington Peninsula. Adriane Howell is a Melbourne-based writer and arts worker and Hydra is her debut novel.

Here’s my chain:

beginning with my first link which is to another Australian author’s debut novel The Dry by Jane Harper, a thriller set in a fictional town five hours west of Melbourne. A Federal Agent, Aaron Falk, returns to his old hometown to attend the funeral of his childhood best friend, Luke. Falk teams up with a local detective and tries to uncover the truth behind Luke’s sudden mysterious death, only to find more questions than answers. I loved this tense thriller.

My Second Link is another book with ‘dry‘ in the title – Dry Bones That Dream by Peter Robinson, the 7th book in the Inspector Banks series. Two masked gunmen tie up Alison Rothwell and her mother, take Keith Rothwell, a local accountant, to the garage of his isolated Yorkshire Dales farmhouse, and blow his head off with a shotgun. Why? This is the question Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks has to ask as he sifts through Rothwell’s life.

The 7th book in Ann Cleeves’ Shetland series is my Third Link. It is Cold Earth featuring DI Jimmy Perez. The body of a dark-haired woman wearing a red silk dress is found in a croft house after a landslide had smashed through the house.

My Fourth Link is via the title of another book with the word ‘cold‘ in the title – The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John Le Carre, first published in 1963. It’s the tale of a British agent who longs to end his career but undertakes one final, bone-chilling assignment. George Smiley appears as a supporting character.

My Fifth Link, The Clocks by Agatha Christie, was also published in 1963. A dead man is found in a room where there are five clocks, all of which, except for the cuckoo clock which announced the time as 3 o’clock, had stopped at 4.13. Poirot runs through what amounts to a potted history of crime fiction and the art of detection. He refers to real crimes, including that of Lizzie Borden and then to examples of fictional crime.

Lizzie Borden is my Sixth Link – See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt, a Melbourne librarian. It was her debut novel. Lizzie Borden was charged with the murders of her parents and was acquitted in June 1893. Speculation about the murders and whether Lizzie was guilty or not continues to the present day. It is based on true events using various resources.

My chain begins and ends with debut novels by Australian authors. In between are crime fiction novels and a spy thriller.

Next month (3 June 2023), we’ll start with Elizabeth Day’s exploration of friendship, Friendaholic.

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 completely forgot about this meme until today, busy at the weekend, so here it is nearly a week late.

The starting book this month is Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen, a book I haven’t read, but it is described on Amazon:

Born to Run will be revelatory for anyone who has ever enjoyed Bruce Springsteen, but this book is much more than a legendary rock star’s memoir. This is a book for workers and dreamers, parents and children, lovers and loners, artists, freaks, or anyone who has ever wanted to be baptized in the holy river of rock and roll.

Here’s my chain:

For my First link I’m going to another memoir: Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading by Lucy Mangan, which is more than an account of what Lucy read, it’s also a history of children’s books, details of their authors and a memoir of Lucy’s childhood.

My Second Link is one of the books Lucy mentioned. I was delighted to find that she too loved Teddy Robinson by Joan L Robinson. Teddy visits a toy-shop, keeps house while Deborah and her mother are out, does some conjuring tricks, meets a china gnome, and lots more.

The author’s second name takes me to my Third Link – the author Peter Robinson who writes the Inspector Banks books. The first book in the series is Gallows View.

My Fourth Link is via the title of another book with the word Gallows in the title – Gallows Court by Martin Edwards, also the first in a series, the Rachel Savernake series. It’s set in 1930s London.

As is my Fifth Link, Bats in the Belfry by E C R Lorac, which incidentally has an introduction by Martin Edwards. A corpse is discovered, ‘headless and handless‘ in a spooky Gothic tower.

My Sixth Link is to another novel with a Gothic tower is The Dead Secret by Wilkie Collins – Porthgenna Tower in Cornwall in the 1820s. A dying woman, Mrs Treverton leaves her husband a letter confessing to a great secret.

My chain has worked its way from a memoir mainly through crime fiction to a 19th century ‘sensation’ novel. Not where I expected it to end.

Next month (6 May 2023), we’ll start with a book on the Stella Prize 2023 shortlist – Hydra by Adriane Howell.

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.

The starting book this month is Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life by Gail Sheehy, a self help book that shows how to use each life crisis as an opportunity for creative change — to grow to your full potential. It’s described as ‘a brilliant road map of adult life shows the inevitable personality and sexual changes we go through in our 20s, 30s, 40s, and beyond’. I haven’t read this book.

My First link is to another self-help book, The Road Less Travelled by M Scott Peck, a book I read many years ago. Sub-titled The New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth this book is a guide through the difficult, painful times in life by showing us how to confront our problems through the key principles of discipline, love and grace.

My Second Link is to The Skeleton Road by Val McDermid. Investigating the identity of the skeleton found, with a bullet hole in its skull, on the rooftop of a crumbling, gothic building in Edinburgh takes Detective Chief Inspector Karen Pirie and her Historic Cases Unit into a dark world of intrigue and betrayal during the Balkan Wars in the 1990s. Dr River Wilde a forensic anthropologist, discovers that the skeleton is a male, he’d been dead between five and ten years and his dental work shows he was originally from one of the Eastern bloc countries.

And so my Third Link is to another character with the name of Wilde in Nemesis, the third book in Rory Clements’s Tom Wilde series. It’s historical fiction set at the beginning of World War Two when Wilde, on his honeymoon in France, rescues his student Marcus Marfield. This is an intricately plotted spy thriller in which Wilde finds himself in great personal danger. For just who is Marcus Marfield? And where does his loyalty lie?

My Fourth Link is via the title of another book called Nemesis – by Agatha Christie. Mr Rafiel, who Miss Marple met in the West Indies, has left her £20,000 in his will on condition she investigates a certain crime, but doesn’t give her any details. He wrote that she had a natural flair for justice leading to a natural flair for crime and reminded her that the code word is Nemesis. 

Agatha Christie was in her eighties when she wrote Nemesis and it was the last book she wrote about Miss Marple.

My Fifth Link is P D James’s The Private Patient another book written by an author in her eighties. It’s set in a private nursing home for rich patients being treated by the famous plastic surgeon George Chandler-Powell. One of the patients is investigative journalist Rhoda Gradwyn. She was looking forward to a week’s peaceful convalescence and the beginning of a new life. But she was never to leave Cheverell Manor alive. Commander Adam Dalgliesh and his team are called in to investigate her murder.

Another character called Rhoda is my Sixth Link, Past Encounters by Davina Blake. This is a thought provoking book about love, loyalty, betrayal and forgiveness. Rhoda Middleton is convinced her husband, Peter, is having an affair. In essence this is a story of a marriage that has drifted, so that Rhoda and Peter no longer talk to each other about the things that matter in their lives. And they both have secrets from each other – big secrets!

My chain is made up of self help books and crime fiction novels, linked by genre, their titles, characters’ names, and two authors writing in their eighties.

Next month (1 April 2023), we’ll start with Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography, Born to Run.

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.

The starting book this month is Trust by Hernan Diaz, described as a sweeping, unpredictable novel about power, wealth and truth, told by four unique, interlocking voices and set against the backdrop of turbulent 1920s New York. I haven’t read this but it does appeal to me.

My First link is to another book set in the 1920s, The Winding Road by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles, a big hardback of 662 pages, that I bought in a library book sale. There are 35 books in the Morland Dynasty series and I haven’t read any of them. This is the 34th book in the series, so I am hoping it will read well as a standalone. The Jazz Age is in full swing in New York, the General Strike is underway in London, the shadows are gathering over Europe and the Wall Street Crash brings the decade to an end.

My Second Link is also a book I bought in a library book sale, Dark Matter by Philip Kerr, subtitled The Private Life of Sir Isaac Newton. This is historical crime fiction, set in 1696 when Newton was the Warden of the Royal Mint at the Tower of London hunting down counterfeiters during the period of the Recoinage of the currency, when fake gold coins were being forged. 

My Third Link is to The Redemption of Alezander Seaton by S G Mclean another book set in the 17th century, not in London, but in Scotland, mainly in the town of Banff. It’s a story of murder and cruelty, but also of love and the power of good over evil, as Alexander Seaton, a schoolteacher, sets out to prove the innocence of his friend Charles Thom, accused of murder.

The author originally wrote under her name – Shona Maclean, but now her books are published under the truncated name, S G MacLean. Another author who has also changed her published name, but the other way round, going from a truncated name to her full first name is Sharon Bolton who formerly wrote as S J Bolton.

And so my Fourth Link is to Sharon Bolton’s Blood Harvest, which was originally published under the name S J Bolton. It’s a dark, scary book and one that I found disturbing, but thoroughly absorbing, It’s a modern Gothic tale about the Fletchers who have just moved into a new house, but someone seems to be trying to drive them away – at first with silly pranks but then with threats that become increasingly dangerous. It’s full of tension, terror and suspense and I was in several minds before the end as to what it was all about.

I read Blood Harvest in September 2011. My Fifth Link is another book I read that month, Taken at the Flood by Agatha Christie. It’s a baffling case for Poirot when he is asked to investigate the death of Enoch Arden, found dead in his room at the local inn. There isn’t a flood in this book – the title is from Shakespeare, as Poirot explains:  “There is a tide in the affairs of men which taken at its flood leads on to fortune …” Someone acted on that, Superintendent. To seize opportunity and turn it to one’s own ends – and that has been triumphantly accomplished…’

But there is a flood in my Sixth Link, The Betrayal of Trust by Susan Hill, the 6th in the Simon Serrailler series. Simon investigates a cold case, that of a teenager missing for 16 years. After flooding causes a landslip on the Moor her body comes to the surface together with that of an unknown female found in a shallow grave nearby. But the police investigations are not the main subject of this book. It focuses on the problems of ageing, hospice care, Motor Neurone Disease, assisted suicide, Parkinson’s Disease and Alzheimer’s Disease. A lot to cope with all at once and at times I found The Betrayal of Trust a deeply depressing book.

My chain is a full circle that going from Trust to The Betrayal of Trust and from the 1920s, passing through the 17th century to the 20th century, and from historical fiction to crime fiction.

Next month (4, March 2023), we’ll start with a book that was a best-selling self-help title in the seventies – Passages by Gail Sheehy. I have never heard of this book before.

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.

The starting book this month is Beach Road by Emily Henry. I haven’t read this and it doesn’t look like a book I’d enjoy, described as a laugh-out-loud love story.

My First link is the word ‘beach’ in the title. It is The Body on the Beach by Simon Brett, a murder mystery I read in July 2010, the first in Simon Brett’s Fethering Mysteries. It’s an easy read, a ‘cozy mystery’ set in a fictitious village on the south coast of England where Carole Seddon has taken early retirement. She discovers a dead body on the beach but by the time the police arrive it had disappeared. She joins forces with her new neighbour, Jude, to solve the mystery.

My Second Link is also a book I read in July 2010 – Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky. Set in 1941-2 it is a novel of the personal lives of the ordinary people of France under the German occupation of their country. Irène was interned in France because she was of Jewish descent. Despite all their efforts her friends and family were unable to find out where she was sent and her fate in Auschwitz was not known until after the end of the war.

My Third Link is also by Némirovsky, Fire in the Blood. This is an intense story of life and death, love and burning passion. It’s about families and their relationships – husbands and wives, young women married to old men,  lovers, mothers, daughters and stepdaughters. 

My Fourth Link is set in Devon in 1944 about a different type of fire. It is Fire in the Thatch by E C R Lorac. When Little Thatch is destroyed in a blaze, the tenant Norman Vaughan is found in the burnt-out debris and Chief Inspector Macdonald of New Scotland Yard is asked to investigate the case.  

My Fifth Link is another E C R Lorac murder mystery set during the Second World War, Murder by Matchlight. It’s set in London in 1945, in the darkness of the blackout as the bombs are still falling. A murder takes place in almost complete darkness in Regent’s Park and Chief Inspector Robert Macdonald is put in charge of the investigation.

My Sixth Link is another novel set during WW2, The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah. It is one of the most moving books I’ve read. It tells of two French sisters and their experiences during the occupation of France in the Second World War. 

My chain after starting with Beach Road, described as a ‘witty love story that will make you laugh a lot, cry a little and fall head over heels, became dominated by murder mysteries and books set mostly during the Second World War.

Next month (4, February 2023), we’ll start with Trust by Hernan Diaz. It was Longlisted for the Booker Prize,The Sunday Times Bestseller and the book that topped the most Best Books of 2022 pick – New York Times, TIME, Slate, Oprah Daily, Kirkus, LA Times, EW. And I haven’t read it.

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.

The starting book this month is The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey. I have a copy of this book but haven’t read it yet. So all I know is that it is set in Alaska in the 1920s where a childless couple build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone–but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees.

It was a nominee for the Goodreads Choice Award in the Best Historical Fiction category in 2012. My First link is to the winner of that Award, which was The Light Between Oceans by M L Stedman. It’s set on a lighthouse keeper’s island, where the Indian Ocean washes into the Great Southern Ocean in the 1920s. A boat washes up on the shore of the island. It holds a dead man – and a crying baby. The only two islanders, Tom and his wife Izzy, are about to make a devastating decision.

My Second Link is a book with a similar title, both books containing the word ‘between‘, The House Between Tides by Sarah Maine. I confuse the two. It is set in the Outer Hebrides, on a crumbling estate with a century-old secret, historical fiction set in 2010  and in 1910, described as ‘An echo of Daphne du Maurier‘. One of the characters is called Hetty,

My Third Link also contains a character called Hetty. In Adam Bede by George Eliot Adam, a hard working young man, a carpenter, with a strong sense of right and wrong, strong and intelligent, is in love with Hetty Sorrel. But she is attracted by the seductive charm of Arthur, the local squire’s son. They begin to meet in secret, with tragic consequences. 

George Eliot is the pseudonym of Mary Anne Evans and my Fourth Link is another novel written under a pseudonym. It’s The Chalk Circle Man, the first book in the Commissaire Adamsberg novels by Fred Vargas, the pseudonym of the French historian, archaeologist and writer Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeauin. It’s a very cleverly constructed and quirky mystery with a twist at the end. Strange blue chalk circles start appearing on the pavements of Paris and then the body of a woman with her throat savagely cut is found in one of them.

Thinking about other books set in Paris brings me to Georges Simenon’s Maigret books. So my Fifth Link is a short story – A Maigret Christmas – set in Paris on Christmas Day in which Maigret and his wife receive two unexpected visitors who lead him on the trail of a mysterious intruder dressed in red and white. I liked the light it throws on Maigret and his wife, their relationship and the sadness they feel at being childless, particularly so at Christmas.

My Sixth Link – is Crime at Lark Cottage by John Bingham a short story in The Christmas Card Crime and Other Stories. One snowy Christmas car trouble and poor weather lead John Bradley to Lark Cottage, the home of Lucy Shaw and her young daughter Julia. Her husband, serving a life-sentence for murder, has escaped from Lanforth Prison, and she implores her unexpected visitor to stay the night. 

My chain this month starts with a snow child in Alaska and ends with another child in a country cottage one snowy Christmas, travelling through an island in the Great Southern Ocean, to the Outer Hebrides and France before ending in England.

Next month (7, Janusry 2022), we’ll start with Beach Read by Emily Henry.