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 The Post Office Girl by Stefan Zweig. I haven’t read it, but here’s what it’s about:

It’s the 1930s. Christine, A young Austrian woman whose family has been impoverished by the war, toils away in a provincial post office. Out of the blue, a telegram arrives from an American aunt she’s never known, inviting her to spend two weeks in a Grand Hotel in a fashionable Swiss resort. She accepts and is swept up into a world of almost inconceivable wealth and unleashed desire, where she allows herself to be utterly transformed. Then, just as abruptly, her aunt cuts her loose and she has to return to the post office, where – yes – nothing will ever be the same.

My first link is a very obvious one, inspired by the mention of post offices – I’ve chosen The Postmistress by Sarah Blake (1). It tells the story of a postmistress (or postmaster as she prefers to call herself) in a small town in Massachusetts during World War II. Although I found this book a bit disappointing and couldn’t connect with the characters, I did enjoy the insights into how the war was affecting the lives of American people in the period just before the US officially joined the conflict.

Another book that explores life in America during the war is Elisabeth Sanxay Holding’s 1947 novel, The Blank Wall (2). I really enjoyed this one! It follows Lucia Holley, who is left at home with her teenage children while her husband is serving in the Navy and finds herself covering up a series of crimes in an attempt to avoid a family scandal. I loved the way Holding blends the details of Lucia’s domestic life with elements of suspense and danger.

The name Lucia appears in the title of the first book in EF Benson’s Mapp and Lucia series, Queen Lucia (3). First published in 1920, this is a humorous novel about a small community presided over by Emmeline Lucas, who really does regard herself as queen of the village! This book wasn’t entirely to my taste and I haven’t continued with the next one yet, but I read it at the start of the Covid pandemic and it was just the sort of light read I needed to take my mind off things.

The word Mapp made me think of maps and mapmakers. In The Bird King by G Willow Wilson (4), a mapmaker in Granada’s Alhambra palace is accused of sorcery when it’s discovered that he has the ability to draw magical maps of places he has never visited. He and his friend, Fatima, flee across 15th century Spain in search of the legendary island of Qaf, said to be the home of the King of the Birds. This is an unusual novel, combining history, myth and fantasy.

Court of Lions by Jane Johnson (5) is also set, at least partly, in the Alhambra. This is a dual timeline novel. Although I found the modern day storyline too melodramatic and some of the threads linking the two periods were unconvincing, the historical storyline is fascinating, covering the life of Sultan Abu Abdullah Muhammad (known as Boabdil) and the fall of Granada in 1492.

From lions to tigers for my final link! The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht (6), which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction (then known as the Orange Prize) in 2011, is set in an unnamed Balkan country and follows a young woman who decides to investigate the circumstances surrounding her grandfather’s death and discovers a link with an old folk tale involving an escaped tiger. I remember finding it interesting but I still haven’t read any of her other books.

And that’s my chain for June. My links have included: post offices, America in WWII, the name Lucia, maps (or Mapps), the Alhambra and big cats!

In July we’ll be starting with Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke.