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 Long Island by Colm Tóibín. I haven’t read it, but it’s a sequel to Brooklyn, which I have read and enjoyed. Here’s what it’s about:

A man with an Irish accent knocks on Eilis Fiorello’s door on Long Island and in that moment everything changes. Eilis and Tony have built a secure, happy life here since leaving Brooklyn – perhaps a little stifled by the in-laws so close, but twenty years married and with two children looking towards a good future.

And yet this stranger will reveal something that will make Eilis question the life she has created. For the first time in years she suddenly feels very far from home and the revelation will see her turn towards Ireland once again. Back to her mother. Back to the town and the people she had chosen to leave behind. Did she make the wrong choice marrying Tony all those years ago? Is it too late now to take a different path?

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There are lots of directions I could have gone in from this month’s starting point, but I’ve decided to link to another novel about an Irish immigrant living in New York: Norah by Cynthia G. Neale (1). It’s set in the 1850s, much earlier than the Tóibín novels, and follows the story of Norah McCabe who left Ireland during the Great Famine to start a new life in America. This is actually Neale’s third book about Norah, but I hadn’t read the first two and that didn’t seem to be a problem.

Almost the same name but a different spelling: my second book is Nora Bonesteel’s Christmas Past by Sharyn McCrumb (2). This is a novella set in the Appalachian Mountains and blending crime, history and folklore. Nora Bonesteel, an elderly woman with ‘the Sight’ is helping her new neighbours celebrate a traditional mountain Christmas when they are interrupted by the arrival of the Sheriff who has come to make an arrest. It’s part of McCrumb’s Ballad series and I read some of the full-length novels in the series years ago, before I started blogging.

The word Ballad leads me to Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (3), a collection of poetry first published in 1798 and revised in 1802. This edition of the book contains both the original and revised versions, which I think will be of more interest to the academic reader than the casual one. It includes some of both poets’ most famous poems, including The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey.

Wordsworth and Coleridge, along with Robert Southey, were known as the Lake Poets because they lived in England’s Lake District. In The Shadow Sister by Lucinda Riley (4), our narrator, Star D’Aplièse, investigates the story of an ancestor who grew up in the Lake District and was a friend of the children’s author Beatrix Potter. This is one of my favourite books from Riley’s Seven Sisters series in which each book focuses on one of the adopted daughters of the mysterious Pa Salt.

A simple link to another novel with the word ‘shadow’ in the title next – Shadow Girls by Carol Birch (5). This is a ghost story set in a school in 1960s Manchester. I enjoyed it, but the supernatural element is only introduced very late in the novel and it’s much more ‘school story’ than ‘ghost story’ which won’t appeal to everyone.

The White Devil by Justin Evans (6) is also a ghost story set in a school – the famous boys’ school, Harrow. One of the new boys at Harrow discovers that he closely resembles Lord Byron, who attended the same school two centuries earlier. I loved the setting, the atmosphere and the Byron connection, but felt that the lack of strong characters let the book down.

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And that’s my chain for October! My links have included: Irish immigrants in New York, the name Nora/Norah, ballads, the Lake District, the word Shadow and ghost stories set in schools.

In November we’ll be starting with Intermezzo by Sally Rooney.

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 After Story by Larissa Behrendt. As usual, I haven’t read it, but here’s what it’s about:

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?

I was drawn to the line ‘to rediscover the wisdom of her own culture and storytelling’, which reminded me of The Story Keeper by Anna Mazzola (1) in which a young woman applies for a job as assistant to a folklorist and travels to the Isle of Skye to collect folk tales from the local people. I enjoyed this book, with its wonderfully atmospheric setting.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (2) is also set on the Isle of Skye, where the Ramsay family have a summer home. The novel begins with six-year-old James Ramsay being promised a trip to the lighthouse the next day if the weather is fine – but the weather is not fine and James won’t get to visit the lighthouse until ten years later. Although this is one of her best known books, it wasn’t really for me and I’ve enjoyed others by Woolf much more.

Another book featuring a lighthouse is The Light Between Oceans by ML Stedman (3). Tom Sherbourne is a lighthouse keeper on the island of Janus Rock, off the coast of Australia. When a boat is washed up on the shore with a baby girl inside, Tom and his wife decide to keep her and raise her as their own child. This is a beautiful, thought-provoking novel which perfectly captures the isolation endured by lighthouse keepers and their families, as well as the guilt experienced after making an impulsive decision that you know was wrong.

The Daughters of Mars by Thomas Keneally (4) is also set, at least partly, in Australia. It tells the story of two sisters who join the Australian Army Nursing Service during the First World War and serve on a hospital ship in the Dardanelles and on the Western Front. It’s a fascinating novel but was spoiled for me by the unconventional punctuation and the distance I felt from the two main characters.

Another book about nursing during the Great War is Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain (5). This is the only non-fiction book in my chain and is Brittain’s memoir covering the years 1900-1925 and describing her experiences as a VAD nurse during the First World War. I highly recommend reading this book if you haven’t already, but be warned that it’s completely heartbreaking in places!

My final book has a shared word in the title. Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments (6) is a sequel to her earlier novel, The Handmaid’s Tale and is again set in Gilead, a dystopian community ruled by a patriarchal regime. The novel is made up of the ‘testaments’ of three characters, giving us three different perspectives of life in Gilead. I didn’t like it as much as the first book, but still found it interesting.

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And that’s my chain for this month. My links have included: Collecting stories, the Isle of Skye, lighthouses, Australia in WWI, wartime nursing and the word ‘testament’. In October, we’ll be starting with Colm Tóibín’s Long Island.