It’s the first Saturday of the month which means it’s time for another Six Degrees of Separation, hosted by Kate of Books are my Favourite and Best. The idea is that Kate chooses a book to use as a starting point and then we have to link it to six other books of our choice to form a chain. A book doesn’t have to be connected to all of the others on the list – only to the one next to it in the chain.
This month we’re starting with Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. As usual, it’s a book I haven’t read, but here’s what it’s about:
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.
The description of Ivan as a ‘competitive chess player’ makes me think of Adam Strauss, a character in Close to Death by Anthony Horowitz (1). Adam is a chess grandmaster and he and his neighbours become suspects in the murder of Giles Kenworthy, who has been making life difficult for them all since moving into their quiet London street. This is the fifth in the Hawthorne and Horowitz series, in which the author uses himself as a character in the books.
Another author who appears as a character in his own books is Akimitsu Takagi. I loved The Noh Mask Murder (2), which I read earlier this year in a new English translation by Jesse Kirkwood. First published in 1949, this is a very enjoyable locked room mystery and I found it interesting to learn about Japan in the post-war period, as well as the different types of masks used in Japanese theatre.
Next, a simple link using a shared word in the title. The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas (3) is the final book in the d’Artagnan series which begins with The Three Musketeers. A lot of people go straight from the first to the last without reading the middle books, but I would recommend not skipping any of them. In The Man in the Iron Mask, d’Artagnan and his three friends, Athos, Porthos and Aramis, become involved in a plot to free a prisoner from the Bastille who closely resembles the King of France.
The word Bastille leads me straight to The Bastille Spy by CS Quinn (4), a fast-paced historical thriller set during the French Revolution and featuring a female spy, Attica Morgan. I described this in my review as ‘a cross between The Scarlet Pimpernel, James Bond and Pirates of the Caribbean’. It’s a book not to be taken too seriously and I’m sure a lot of readers will find it fun, but it wasn’t really for me and I haven’t continued with the sequel.
I’ve read and reviewed several other books by authors with the surname Quinn (Kate Quinn, Frances Quinn and Anthony Quinn). Apart from the Quinns, the only other author I’ve read and reviewed on my blog whose name begins with a Q is Sarah Quigley, who wrote The Conductor (5). This is a fascinating novel about the conductor Karl Eliasberg who is given the task of performing the Seventh Symphony by Shostakovich to raise morale during the Siege of Leningrad.
In Murder to Music by Margaret Newman (6), a conductor is shot dead during a choir’s performance of a new mass. Detective Superintendent Simon Hudson happens to be present in the audience and begins to investigate. However, his own girlfriend, Delia, is on the choir committee and can’t be ruled out as a suspect! This entertaining 1959 novel could have been the start of a new mystery series, but Newman changed direction and began writing romance and family sagas under other pseudonyms.
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And that’s my chain for November. My links included: competitive chess players; authors using themselves as characters; the word ‘mask’; the Bastille; Q authors; and conductors. Intermezzo is a musical term, meaning ‘a short connecting instrumental movement’, so by finishing with Murder to Music I have managed to bring the chain full circle!
In December we’ll be starting with Sandwich by Catherine Newman.
She Reads Novels 
I love how you’ve ended with music rather than began as many of us have done. I remember DNFing The Conductor, but Murder to Music sounds great.
I’m not sure how that happened – I didn’t do it intentionally but it worked out very well!
Very nicely done chain to a circle here! The book The Conductor does sound good. Thanks.
The Conductor is fascinating and based on a true story. I really enjoyed it.
So far most of the chains seem to have gone Chess or Music. It’s been fun seeing that, and then seeing where people have gone from there. I love your next link being on authors who appear in their own books! Good one. I don’t know any of your books. but I did enjoy reading about them.
I didn’t think chess would be such a popular first link, but it seems a lot of us have gone in that direction!
Love that you found a chess link to start! I enjoyed Noh Mask very much too–for all the reasons you mention and for the twists at the end. I think I’m one of those guilty parties who have yet to read 10 years Later and 20 years Later but have read Iron Mask 🙂
Yes, I loved the twists at the end of Noh Mask too. The other books between The Three Musketeers and The Man in the Iron Mask are definitely all worth reading – I really loved Twenty Years After!
I have them on my list and hope to get to them sometime (I hesitate to say soon any more :D)
Yours is the first full circle I’ve seen, and very neatly done!
Thanks. I didn’t set out to bring it full circle, but the last two links just fell nicely into place!
Fun chain of books! I haven’t read any of them, but I’m intrigued by the two with competitive chess players.
I don’t think I’m interested in reading Intermezzo, but the other book with the competitive chess player, Close to Death, was very entertaining!
Fabulous chain – good work coming full circle. I couldn’t find any links between my first and last this month!
I don’t manage to form a full circle very often, but it happened accidentally this month!
An excellent chain. I wouldn’t kick any of these off my TBR list.
I enjoyed all of these, though the CS Quinn a bit less than the others.
That’s helpful – thanks.
Some very appealing books here! I haven’t got as far as you with Horowitz (although this series is very amusing) and I think Murder to Music would be a good gift for my mother if I can find a copy. This author does not ring a bell at all.
I think Margaret Newman only wrote that one mystery novel under that name. I read a family saga, the House of Hardie, which she published as Anne Melville and it was quite enjoyable.
Great chain 🙂
Thanks!