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.
