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 I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. Usually I haven’t read the first book in these chains (and have often never even heard of them), but this is one I have read and enjoyed! Here’s what it’s about:

‘I write this sitting in the kitchen sink’ is the first line of this timeless, witty and enchanting novel about growing up.

Cassandra Mortmain lives with her bohemian and impoverished family in a crumbling castle in the middle of nowhere. Her journal records her life with her beautiful, bored sister, Rose, her fading glamorous stepmother, Topaz, her little brother Thomas and her eccentric novelist father who suffers from a financially crippling writer’s block. However, all their lives are turned upside down when the American heirs to the castle arrive and Cassandra finds herself falling in love for the first time.

The title of the Dodie Smith novel is metaphorical, but my first link is to a book about people really trying to capture a castle! Winter Siege by Ariana Franklin and Samantha Norman (1) is set in the 12th century during the Anarchy, the period of civil war when King Stephen and his cousin, the Empress Matilda, battled for the English throne. The castle being besieged in the novel is the fictional Kenniford Castle where the Empress seeks sanctuary during the war. Ariana Franklin sadly died leaving the book unfinished, so it was completed by her daughter Samantha.

I recently finished reading another book completed by the author’s child after their mother’s death: Atlas: The Story of Pa Salt by Lucinda Riley and Harry Whittaker (2). This is the last of eight books in Riley’s Seven Sisters series and Whittaker wrote it using his mother’s notes. The previous seven books tell the stories of the seven adopted daughters of Pa Salt, each named after a star in the Seven Sisters star cluster, and this final novel delves into the history of Pa Salt himself, answering some of the mysteries raised throughout the series. I haven’t posted my review yet, but it should be up soon.

Atlas is the name of a character from mythology – a Titan condemned to hold up the sky for eternity. Another book with the name of a mythological character in the title is The Labours of Hercules by Agatha Christie (3). This is a collection of short stories featuring Christie’s famous detective Hercule Poirot. He investigates twelve different cases in this collection, each one loosely inspired by one of the twelve Labours of Hercules.

The Christie book was published in 1947 and so was Prince of Foxes (4), Samuel Shellabarger’s classic historical adventure novel. Set in Renaissance Italy, it’s the story of Andrea Orsini, who is given the task of negotiating a marriage between Alfonso d’Este and Lucrezia Borgia. I described it in my review as a book involving “battles, duels, clever disguises, last-minute escapes, sieges, miracles and all sorts of trickery and deception”. I loved it, but still haven’t read any of Shellabarger’s other books.

Now from a book with ‘foxes’ in the title to an author with the same animal in her name! The Somnambulist by Essie Fox (5) is an atmospheric Gothic novel set in Victorian England, featuring a large country house, family secrets and intrigue, ghostly occurrences and, as the title suggests, a theme of sleepwalking, both literal and metaphorical. The title is a reference to the 1871 painting The Somnambulist by John Everett Millais.

The Millais painting, which depicts a woman in a long white nightgown, is thought to have been inspired by The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (6), which was published more than ten years earlier. I love Collins’ books and this classic Victorian sensation novel is one of my favourites (tied with Armadale). Who can forget his wonderful heroine Marian Halcombe, the sinister Count Fosco, and that eerie meeting between Walter Hartright and the mysterious ‘woman in white’ on a lonely London road?

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And that’s my chain for October! My links have included: capturing castles, parent and child writing teams, titles featuring mythological characters, books published in 1947, the word ‘fox’ and Millais’ The Somnambulist.

In November we’ll be starting with Western Lane by Chetna Maroo.