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 Flashlight by Susan Choi, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2025. I haven’t read it, but here’s what it’s about:

One evening, ten-year-old Louisa and her father, Serk, take a walk out on the breakwater. They are spending the summer in a coastal Japanese town. Hours later, Louisa wakes on the beach, soaked to the skin. Her father is missing: presumably drowned.

This sudden event shatters their small family. As Louisa and her American mother return to the US, Serk’s disappearance reverberates across time and space, and the mystery of what really happened that night slowly unravels.

The first book that comes to mind is Surfacing by Margaret Atwood (1), in which another father goes missing, possibly drowned. His daughter, an unnamed narrator, returns to her childhood home on an island in northern Quebec to discover the truth behind his disappearance. I read the book last year and found it fascinating, although I’m not sure I fully understood it all.

Quebec is my next link. The short story The Custom of the Army appears in Diana Gabaldon’s Seven Stones to Stand or Fall (2), a collection of stories and novellas featuring characters from her Outlander series. In The Custom of the Army, Lord John Grey goes to Canada to serve as a witness at a court martial and becomes caught up in the Battle of Quebec of 1759. That one wasn’t one of my favourite stories, but I enjoyed the collection overall.

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese (3) shares the word ‘stone’ in the title. I loved this wonderful novel set in an Ethiopian hospital and following the stories of the conjoined twin sons of a British surgeon and an Indian nun. I still haven’t read Abraham Verghese’s second novel, but I really should.

Another book featuring conjoined twins is The Bell in the Lake by Lars Mytting (4), the first in the Sister Bells trilogy about life in the remote Norwegian village of Butangen where two church bells – commemorating the twins, Gunhild and Halfrid – are said to have supernatural powers. The novel was originally published in Norwegian and translated into English by Deborah Dawkin.

Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset (5) is another book set in Norway and written by a Norwegian author. It’s actually a trilogy, but often combined into one volume and tells the story of the title character, who grows up in Norway in the 14th century. It’s a sad, tragic story, but I loved it and can recommend Tiina Nunnally’s translation. The book led to Undset winning the 1928 Nobel Prize in Literature “principally for her powerful descriptions of Northern life during the Middle Ages”.

Another novel I’ve read by a Nobel Prize winner is Nights of Plague by Orhan Pamuk (6), translated by Ekin Oklap. It’s set on a fictional Mediterranean island during an outbreak of plague at the turn of the 20th century and Pamuk uses this a starting point to explore the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

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And that’s my chain for February! My links include: missing fathers, Quebec, the word ‘stone’, conjoined twins, Norwegian authors and Nobel Prize winners. The chain took me from Japan to the Mediterranean via Canada, Ethiopia and Norway, and features three books in translation.

In March we’ll be starting with Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë – one of my favourite classics!