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 Seascraper by Benjamin Wood. I read it last month for Novellas in November and loved it. Here’s what it’s about:

Thomas lives a slow, deliberate life with his mother in Longferry, working his grandpa’s trade as a shanker. He rises early to take his horse and cart to the grey, gloomy beach to scrape for shrimp; spending the rest of the day selling his wares, trying to wash away the salt and scum, pining for Joan Wyeth down the street and rehearsing songs on his guitar. At heart, he is a folk musician, but it remains a private dream.

When a striking visitor turns up, bringing the promise of Hollywood glamour, Thomas is shaken from the drudgery of his days and begins to see a different future. But how much of what the American claims is true, and how far can his inspiration carry Thomas?

Haunting and timeless, this is the story of a young man hemmed in by his circumstances, striving to achieve fulfilment far beyond the world he knows.

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Seascraper reminded me very much of The Horseman by Tim Pears (1), first in a trilogy of novels set in Devon in the early 20th century. They are both quiet, gentle novels with rural settings and descriptions of the protagonist’s daily work (catching shrimp for Thomas, farming tasks for Leo in The Horseman). Horses also play an important role in both novels. I still haven’t continued with the trilogy and haven’t decided if I want to as I didn’t enjoy the first book as much as I’d hoped.

The title of the Tim Pears book made me think of the headless horseman in Washington Irving’s classic short story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (2). First published in 1820, it’s set in an old Dutch settlement in New York and revolves around the legend of a ghostly soldier who lost his head in battle and rides through Sleepy Hollow every night in search of his missing head. You may have seen the 1999 Tim Burton adaptation, but the original story is definitely worth reading as well.

Another book with the word ‘hollow’ in the title is The Hollow by Agatha Christie (3). The Hollow is the name of a country house where a group of people have gathered for the weekend when a murder takes place. This is a Poirot novel although he doesn’t play as big a part in it as he usually does and Christie herself described it as “the one I ruined by the introduction of Poirot”.

The Hollow was published in 1946 and so was Ride the Pink Horse by Dorothy B. Hughes (4). The novel is set in Santa Fe during the Fiesta festival, which ends with the burning of Zozobra, a wooden effigy symbolic of worries and gloom. The story follows Sailor, a blackmailer on the trail of a senator whose wife has been murdered. I loved this book mainly for the setting but was also gripped by the plot.

The cover of the Hughes novel brings to mind the carved wooden horses on the carousel in Fiza Saeed McLynn’s The Midnight Carousel (5). The carousel of the title was built for the Grand Exhibition in Paris by Gilbert Cloutier and gains a sinister reputation when Gilbert disappears immediately afterwards. As the years go by and more people disappear while riding the carousel horses, Detective Laurent Bisset begins to investigate. I read this book earlier this year and really enjoyed it.

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (6) is the obvious next link. Both books have fairground/circus settings and a similar magical atmosphere, although this one is more fantasy whereas the Saeed McLynn is a mystery. Although I found the plot and characters slightly disappointing, I loved the vivid descriptions of Le Cirque des Rêves, or the Circus of Dreams, and wished I could visit it myself!

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And that’s my chain for December! My links have included: rural life, horsemen, the word ‘hollow’, books published in 1946, carousel horses and fairground/circus settings.

Nest month is a wildcard to begin the year. We can either start with the book we finished this month’s chain with or, if we didn’t participate in December, begin with the last book we read.

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 We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. For once, this is a book that I’ve actually read – and also one that I enjoyed. Here’s my synopsis of the plot, taken from my review posted in 2011:

The book is narrated by eighteen-year-old Mary Katherine Blackwood, or ‘Merricat’, who lives with her sister Constance, their Uncle Julian, and Jonas the cat in a big house on the edge of town. Near the beginning of the story we see Merricat walking home with some shopping, being taunted and chanted at by everyone she passes. It seems the Blackwoods are very unpopular, but at first we don’t know why.

When Merricat returns home, it becomes even more apparent that something is wrong. Merricat herself does not seem like a normal eighteen-year-old – she likes to bury things in the grounds of the Blackwood house and believes that using magic words and rituals will protect her home and family. Constance is agoraphobic and afraid to walk any further than the garden. Uncle Julian, confined to a wheelchair, is obsessed with the book he’s writing about a tragedy that occurred six years earlier. And what exactly has happened to the rest of the Blackwood family?

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a dark, unsettling novel. My first link is to another dark novel with the word ‘castle’ in the title: The Nightingale’s Castle by Sonia Velton (1). This is a reimagining of the story of Countess Erzsébet Báthory (often anglicised to Elizabeth Bathory), thought to be a possible inspiration behind Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Bathory and her servants were accused of murdering hundreds of Hungarian peasant girls, making her one of the most notorious serial killers in history.

The Angel Makers by Patti McCracken (2) is a nonfiction book about another Hungarian serial killer. Zsuzsanna Fazekas, known in the book as Auntie Suzy, was a midwife and the ringleader of a circle of women responsible for the deaths of over one hundred men between 1914 and 1929. Suzy was the one who sold bottles of arsenic to the other women in her village and, in the absence of a village doctor, the one who dictated the causes of death to be put on the death certificates.

Poisoning also plays a big part in Marjorie Bowen’s The Poisoners (3), originally published in 1936. The book is set in 17th century Paris during the reign of the Sun King, Louis XIV, and revolves around a famous murder scandal known as L’affaire des poisons. I described it in my review as a story featuring “fortune tellers and spies, counterfeiters and apothecaries, an empty house which hides sinister secrets, mysterious letters marked with the sign of a pink carnation, and a society thought to be involved in black magic.”

I don’t want a whole chain full of serial killers, so I’ll try to send things in a slightly different direction now. Another book published in 1936 is A Shilling for Candles by Josephine Tey (4). This is one of Tey’s Alan Grant mysteries (of which I’m sorry to say I’ve still only read two) and was adapted for film by Alfred Hitchcock under the title Young and Innocent.

A shilling is a coin, so that leads me to Sugar Money by Jane Harris (5). This novel is set in the Caribbean in the year 1765. Our narrator, teenage Lucien, and his older brother Emile are slaves working on a sugar plantation in French-ruled Martinique. It’s a fascinating book exploring some aspects of slavery I had never read about before – and it’s also partly based on a true story.

The final book in my chain is The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins (6). The book begins with Frannie, a former slave, awaiting trial in London for the murder of her employers (sorry, it seems I couldn’t get away from murderers this month after all). However, the crime element is only one small part of the story – a large part of the novel is devoted to Frannie remembering her childhood on a sugar plantation in Jamaica and her experiences on arriving in England.

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And that’s my chain for November! My links have included: The word ‘castle’, Hungary, female poisoners, 1936, money and sugar plantations.

In December we’ll be starting with Seascraper by Benjamin Wood.