Tag: Giving Up the Ghost

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.

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 The Museum of Modern Love by by Heather Rose (Kate’s pick was inspired by Sue’s recent post about writers and artists). I haven’t read this, but I would like to. This is the description on Amazon UK:

Arky Levin, a film composer in New York, has promised his wife that he will not visit her in hospital, where she is suffering in the final stages of a terminal illness. She wants to spare him a burden that would curtail his creativity, but the promise is tearing him apart. One day he finds his way to MOMA and sees Mariana Abramovic in The Artist is Present. The performance continues for seventy-five days and, as it unfolds, so does Arky. As he watches and meets other people drawn to the exhibit, he slowly starts to understand what might be missing in his life and what he must do.

My first link is via a terminal illness to The Salt Path, Raynor Winn’s memoir about walking the South Coast Path when Moth her husband was diagnosed with a terminal illness. They were homeless, with no means of income except for £48 pounds a week. They had lost their home, business and livelihood, after investing in one of a friend’s companies that had failed. It is about the determination to live life, about overcoming pain and hardship, and the healing power of nature. It is about homelessness and the different reactions and attitudes of the people they met when they told them they were homeless.

My second link is How to Catch a Mole by Marc Hamer, part memoir, part a nature study of the British countryside, part poetry, and, of course, about moles. After leaving school Marc Hamer was homeless for a while. He has worked in art galleries, marketing, graphic design and taught creative writing in a prison before becoming a gardener. And before writing this book he had been a traditional molecatcher for years.

My third link is Hilary Mantel’s Giving Up the Ghost, a remarkable memoir. It came across to me as being clear, honest and very moving. She thought it was because of her that her parents were not happy and that without her they would have had a chance in life. It didn’t get any better when her father left home and she was left to live with two younger brothers, their mother and her mother’s lover. Home was a place where secrets were kept and opinions were not voiced. Her experience of ghosts at the age of 7 was horrifying as she felt as though something came inside her, ‘some formless, borderless evil’.

My fourth link is The Girl Who Died by Ragnar Jonasson, Icelandic noir, a mix of horror and psychological thriller, with a strong sense of place. Skálar is a close-knit community that doesn’t welcome newcomers, keeping its secrets well hidden. The only person who welcomes Una, to the village is Salka, the mother of Edda, one of the two girls Una is to teach. Her house is said to be haunted by the ghost of a young girl who had died fifty years earlier,

My fifth link is Asking for the Moon by Reginald Kill, a collection of four novellas. Two of them feature ghosts, Pascoe’s Ghost and Dalziel’s Ghost. But I think that the best one is the first story, The Last National Service Man which tells how Dalziel and Pascoe first met. Neither of them are impressed by the other. Dalziel thinks Pascoe is everything he dislikes – a graduate, well spoken, and a Southerner from south of Sheffield. Pascoe thinks Dalziel is an archetypical bruiser who got results by kicking down doors and beating out questions in Morse code on a suspect’s head.

My final link is to the final Inspector Morse novel, The Remorseful Day by Colin Dexter. The plot is detailed, complex and as usual, with Morse, a puzzle type murder mystery with plenty of challenging clues. Sergeant Lewis is left to investigate the murder of nurse Yvonne Harrison that had remained unsolved for a year. When Morse phones to say he is feeling unwell Lewis is most concerned – Morse seldom mentioned his health, what is wrong with him?

The main focus of the book is on Morse and how he copes with his illness and his drinking habits. It becomes obvious just how alone he is in the world and how devastating his situation is to Lewis.

The first three books in my chain are memoirs and the other three are crime fiction/psychological thriller novels. Beginning in America it travels to the UK, then to Iceland, before ending back in the UK.

Next month (September 7, 2024), we’ll start with  After Story by Larissa Behrendt.