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 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.

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 Naked Chef by Jamie Oliver, his first book published in 1999. Just look how young he looked when he was 25. We bought the book and watched the TV programme and since then we’ve carried on watching and buying his books. Of course, he wasn’t naked but had stripped down his recipes to the basics.

My First link is to not any of Jamie Oliver’s book but to Neil Oliver’s book The Story of the British Isles in 100 Places – described on the book jacket inside cover as ‘a broad sweep of British history and landscape’. I’ve enjoyed watching Neil Oliver’s TV documentaries and his book looks just as informative, encompassing our earliest history, via Romans and Vikings, civil war, industrial revolution and two world wars, looking at the places that he considers to be the most characteristic of our history, with many colour photographs. The last one in his book is Dungeness, a place he describes as ‘the most unforgettable location in Britain‘.

My Second Link is The Birdwatcher by William Shaw. It’s set in Dungeness on the Kent coast, a wind-swept shingle beach close to the Nuclear Power Station and Romney. Sergeant William South is a birdwatcher a methodical and quiet man. Alternating with the present day story is the story of Billy, a thirteen year old living in Northern Ireland during the ‘Troubles’. 

Using the Troubles in Northern Ireland my Third Link is Turning for Home by Barney Norris. The narration is split between Robert and Kate interspersed with extracts from the Boston Tapes, an oral history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland recording the recollections of combatants on both sides. Robert’s day is interrupted by a phone call from Frank, a retired Oxford professor, whom he had known from his days as a civil servant working in Ireland.

My Fourth Link is to The Riddle of the Fourth Mile by Colin Dexter, a murder mystery involving two more Oxford professors. When a dismembered and headless corpse is found in the Oxford Canal it could have been that of Morse’s his old classics tutor, Browne-Smith or Browne-Smith’s hated rival, Westerby. This is a most complicated mystery, one of the ‘puzzle’ types.

My Fifth Link also has a headless corpse. It’s Rivers of London by Ben Aaranovich. In this book a headless corpse is found in front of the West Portico of St Paul’s at Convent Garden. Peter Grant is a Detective Constable and a trainee wizard in this urban fantasy novel – a fast-paced police procedural of a very different kind. He lives in the Folly in Russell Square with DCI Thomas Nightingale who is his mentor. Molly who is fae (a type of fairy) is the housekeeper, chef, and butler.

My Sixth Link – Molly is also in Broken Homes (the 4th book in the Rivers of London series). Her culinary skills are legendary but after Peter’s  arrival at the Folly Molly introduced more modern cuisine onto the menu, partially through their gifts of modern cookbooks and partially through her own hard work. Her current cooking and baking appears to be inspired by both Jamie Oliver and The Great British Bake Off.This then completes the circle linking back to the starting book, The Naked Chef.

My chain this month starts with Jamie Oliver’s cookery book and ends with a book in which one of the character’s cooking is inspired by Jamie Oliver, travelling through non-fiction, crime fiction and urban fantasy novels.

Next month (3 December, 2022), we’ll start with The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey.

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 Notes on a Scandal by Zoë Heller. I haven’t read it. It’s about a teacher at a London comprehensive school who has an illicit affair with an underage pupil. It was shortlisted by the 2003 Booker Prize and there’s a film version too, which I’ve not seen either.

I’m not immediately drawn to read it, so for my First Link I’m using the word ‘Notes‘ in the title:

Notes From An Exhibition by Patrick Gale. Artist Rachel Kelly, a manic-depressive, subject to highs and lows is found dead in her Penzance studio, leaving her family with lots of unanswered questions. It becomes clear that her Quaker husband knew nothing about her early life.

My Second Link is also via the title, this time using the word ‘Exhibition‘ – Pictures at an Exhibition by Camilla Macpherson. This is structured around Daisy’s letters to her cousin Elizabeth telling her about the paintings on display at London’s National Gallery during the war years. It’s a dual time period novel moving between the present day and the Second World War,

My Third Link is via the word ‘pictures‘ in the title – Pictures of Perfection by Reginald Hill. Set high in the Mid-Yorkshire Dales in the traditional village of Enscombe, Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel and DCI Peter Pascoe investigate the disappearance of a policeman. As they dig beneath the veneer of idyllic village life a pattern emerges of family feuds, ancient injuries, cheating and lies. And finally, as the community gathers for the traditional Squire’s Reckoning, it looks as if the simmering tensions will erupt in a bloody climax.

Still using a word in the title my Fourth Link is the word ‘Perfection‘ in The Idea of Perfection by Kate Grenville, which won the 2001 Orange Prize for Fiction. The title indicates the theme of the book with the characters all falling short of the impossible aim of perfection. Set in Karakarook, in New South Wales the two main characters are Douglas Cheeseman, an engineer who has come to pull down a quaint old bent bridge before it falls down and Harley Savage, who has come to advise the residents how to promote their inheritance.

My Fifth Link is a bit of a leap as I’m moving away from a book set in New South Wales to one set in South Wales – How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn – a story of life in a mining community in rural South Wales as Huw Morgan is preparing to leave the valley where he had grown up. It tells of life before the First World War.

My Sixth Link is to another book about mining – Gray Mountain by John Grisham. This book is just as much a campaign against injustice and the misuse of power, about the good little guys against the big bad guys as his earlier books are. In this case it’s the big coal companies that come under the microscope, in particular companies that are  ruining the environment by strip-mining in the Appalachian mountains.

My chain this month has travelled from London through Cornwall, to New South Wales and Wales to the Appalachian Mountains – quite a journey!

Next month (November 5, 2022), we’ll start with a cookbook – The Naked Chef by Jamie Oliver.