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 are starting with The Anniversary by Stephanie Bishop. It’s not a book I’ve read – or had even heard of until now – but here’s what it’s about:

Novelist J.B. Blackwood is on a cruise with her husband, Patrick, to celebrate their wedding anniversary.

Patrick is older than J.B., formerly her professor. But now his success is starting to wane and hers may overshadow his.

For days they sail in the sun. They lie about drinking, reading, sleeping, having sex. There is nothing but dark water all around them.

Then a storm hits, and Patrick falls off the ship. J.B. is left alone, as the search for what happened to Patrick – and the truth about their marriage – begins.

With a stay-up-all-night plot and breathtaking prose, this is the haunting and unforgettable story of a marriage and a death.

~

I’m using the idea of ‘falling off the ship’ as my first link. Someone else who was swept overboard on a cruise is Nona Ranskill in Miss Ranskill Comes Home by Barbara Euphan Todd (1). Stranded on a desert island just before the start of World War II, Miss Ranskill is rescued after almost four years and returns to England to find that war has broken out in her absence and life has changed almost beyond recognition. I loved this book; it was one of the first books published by Persephone that I read and still one of my favourites.

Another novel set on an island is Haven by Emma Donoghue (2). In 7th century Ireland, three monks set out on a pilgrimage to look for an isolated place to build a monastery. Their search takes them to the steep, rocky island of Skellig Michael, uninhabited except for thousands of birds. The novel follows the monks as they try to establish their new settlement and prepare for a life of seclusion. It’s more interesting than it sounds, although I’ve preferred other books by Donoghue.

A pilgrimage of a very different sort takes place in Jerome K. Jerome’s Diary of a Pilgrimage (3). First published in 1891, the Diary is narrated by J, an Englishman who travels to Germany with a friend to see the famous Passion Play at Oberammergau. Although it’s not as funny as Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, it is written in a similar style, with J sharing amusing anecdotes about the things he experiences and people he meets during the journey.

Staying with books set in Germany, my next link is to Nightmare in Berlin by Hans Fallada (4). Despite the title, there’s no connection to Fallada’s more famous book, Alone in Berlin, and this is a completely separate novel, following the story of Dr Doll and his wife Alma in post-war Berlin. Apparently the book is very autobiographical, as Fallada himself, like Dr Doll in the novel, was appointed mayor of a small rural town after the war and later struggles with a serious morphine addiction. I read a translation by Allan Blunden from 2016 (the first time the book was made available in English).

Nightmares are bad dreams and the title of my next book is the opposite – Dreams of Joy by Lisa See (5). Set in the 1950s, this is the sequel to See’s Shanghai Girls and follows nineteen-year-old Joy Louie as she leaves her home in Los Angeles to travel to Shanghai, full of enthusiasm for Chairman Mao’s new communist China. As you can imagine, the story isn’t very joyful at all and Joy eventually begins to learn that the new regime isn’t as wonderful as she hoped.

Another book about Communist China, a non-fiction one this time, finishes my chain. It’s Wild Swans (6), Jung Chang’s autobiography, telling the stories of her grandmother, mother and finally herself and taking us on a journey through the history of 20th century China. I found this book fascinating and was able to learn a lot from it; it’s also one of the most gripping non-fiction books I’ve ever read.

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And that’s my chain for May! My links have included: falling overboard, islands, pilgrimages, books set in Germany, good and bad dreams and Communist China.

In June we’ll be starting with Butter by Asako Yuzuki.

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 were told we could begin with any travel guide of our choice. Coincidentally, I have just begun reading Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West’s 1941 travel book about her journey through the former Yugoslavia. I’ve wanted to read this for years and have been put off by the length, but I’ve finally decided to just plunge in.

Rebecca West’s epic masterpiece not only provides deep insight into the former country of Yugoslavia; it is a portrait of Europe on the brink of war. A heady cocktail of personal travelogue and historical insight, this product of an implacably inquisitive intelligence remains essential for anyone attempting to understand the history of the Balkan states, and the wider ongoing implications for a fractured Europe.

Girl at War by Sara Nović (1) is set in Croatia in 1991, during the breakup of Yugoslavia. As the country descends into war, we see events unfold through the eyes of a ten-year-old girl. I found this a very moving and emotional novel and enjoyed reading it during a trip to Dubrovnik.

A book with a shared word in the title is War Horse by Michael Morpurgo (2). It’s a children’s book, but can also be appreciated by adults; I read it in preparation for going to see the Steven Spielberg film version in 2012. The story is narrated by Joey, a young horse who serves in the cavalry on the battlefields of World War I.

Lean on Pete by Willy Vlautin (3) is also a book about a horse. It’s the story of fifteen-year-old Charley, who gets a job at the Portland Meadows race track in Oregon and forms a close bond with the racehorse, Lean on Pete.
As well as being an author, Vlautin is currently the guitarist and vocalist with the American country soul band The Delines.

Another author who is also a musician is Mat Osman, the bassist in the band Suede (and brother of author and TV presenter Richard Osman). I have read his second novel, The Ghost Theatre (4), which is set in an alternate history version of Elizabethan London, where one of our protagonists belongs to a community of bird-worshippers known as Aviscultans.

Birds provide the link to my next book, The Bird King by G Willow Wilson (5), in which a mapmaker accused of sorcery and the ability to draw magical maps flees across 15th century Spain in search of the legendary island of Qaf, said to be the home of the King of the Birds. I found this a very unusual novel, combining history, myth and fantasy.

In Kim Fay’s novel, The Map of Lost Memories (6), a woman dreams of making an important historical discovery and establishing her own museum. Setting off on an expedition to Cambodia, she begins a search for ten lost copper scrolls recording the history of the Khmer people. I think this is possibly the only book I’ve read set in Cambodia!

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And that’s my chain for April. My links have included: books set in the former Yugoslavia, books with war in the title, horses, authors who are musicians, birds and maps. Staying with the ‘travel’ theme, my chain this month has taken me to Croatia, France, USA, England, Spain and Cambodia.

In May we’ll be starting with a novel longlisted for the 2024 Stella Prize – The Anniversary by Stephanie Bishop.

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 Tom Lake by Ann Patchett. I read this last year and liked it, although not as much as I hoped to. Here’s how I described it in my review:

“The title of Ann Patchett’s latest novel, Tom Lake, doesn’t refer to a person, as I’d assumed before I started reading, but to a place – a town in Michigan with a theatre overlooking the lake. One summer in the 1980s, a theatrical group gather at Tom Lake to rehearse the Thornton Wilder play, Our Town. The role of Emily has gone to Lara, a young woman who previously played that same part in a high school production. Here at Tom Lake, Lara meets and falls in love with the charismatic Peter Duke, the actor who plays her father in Our Town and who goes on to become a famous Hollywood star.

Many years later, in 2020, Lara and her husband, Joe, are living on a Michigan farm with their three adult daughters, Emily, Maisie and Nell, who have all come home to be with their parents as the Covid pandemic sweeps across the world. While they help to harvest cherries from the family orchard, the girls ask Lara to tell them about her relationship with Duke. As they listen to her story unfold, they discover things about their mother’s past that makes them reassess everything they thought they knew about her and about themselves.”

Using cherries as my first link takes me to another book featuring fruit: The Orange Girl by Jostein Gaarder (1), a novel first published in Norwegian and translated into English by James Anderson. Our narrator, a teenage boy whose father has died, reads a letter left to him by his father describing how, as a young man in 1970s Oslo, he had a series of encounters with a mysterious young woman wearing an orange dress and carrying a bag of oranges.

Another novel set in Norway and translated from Norwegian (this time by Deborah Dawkin) is The Reindeer Hunters by Lars Mytting (2). This is the second book in the Sister Bells trilogy about life in the remote village of Butangen where two church bells are said to have supernatural powers. I’ve just discovered that the final book, The Night of the Scourge, is being published in January next year, so that’s something to look forward to!

From reindeer hunting to fortune hunting now! Daisy Goodwin’s The Fortune Hunter (3) is the story of Empress Elizabeth of Austria (known as Sisi) and her relationship with Captain Bay Middleton, a British cavalry officer who acts as her ‘pilot’ (or guide) when she visits England for the hunting season in 1875. Bay, like Sisi, was a real person; he was a notable horseman and jockey who, in the novel, is preparing to race in the Grand National with his horse, Tipsy.

The Master of Verona by David Blixt (4) also features a horse race, in this case the Palio, the medieval race that still takes place today in Siena. The Palio is just one small part of this very entertaining novel set in 14th century Italy and inspired by both the story of Romeo and Juliet and the life of the poet Dante Alighieri. It’s the first in a series of which I’ve also read the second, but still need to finish the others.

A book with a shared word in the title is Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill (5) by Belgian author Dimitri Verhulst. This novella, translated from the original Dutch by David Colmer, is the story of a woman who lives alone in a cottage on a hill, waiting for a cello to be made from the wood of the tree from which her husband hanged himself. This is a beautifully written little book, but it wasn’t really for me.

My final link is to another novel featuring cellos. The Cellist of Sarajevo (6) by Steven Galloway is set in 1992 during the Bosnian War. It tells the story of a cellist in the besieged city of Sarajevo, who plays his music in the street for twenty-two consecutive days as a message of hope and resilience.

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And that’s my chain for March! My links have included fruit, Norway, hunting, horse races, Verona and cellos. It’s a very international chain this month, taking me from America to Bosnia via Norway, England, Italy and Belgium – and including three translated books.

In April we’ll be starting with any travel guide of our choice.

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 are each starting with either the book with which we finished last month’s chain or the last book we read. My January chain finished with The Loving Spirit by Daphne du Maurier, so I’m going to use that as my starting point. The novel was published in 1931 and was du Maurier’s first. Here’s what I said in my review:

The Loving Spirit is a family saga spanning four generations of the Coombe family. It begins in 1830 with the story of Janet Coombe, a passionate young woman who is forced to abandon her dreams of going to sea when she marries and settles down to start a family with her husband, a boat builder. We then move forward through the decades, ending one hundred years later in the 1930s. Along the way we meet Janet’s son, Joseph, her grandson, Christopher, and finally her great-granddaughter, Jennifer. The book is divided into four parts, one devoted to each of the main characters, but I won’t go into any plot details here as each story has its own set of dramas and surprises which I’ll leave you to discover for yourself.

The Loving Spirit takes its title from an Emily Brontë poem, Self-Interrogation:

“Alas! The countless links are strong,
That bind us to our clay;
The loving spirit lingers long,
And would not pass away!”.

Another book with a title taken from a poem (in this case Rudyard Kipling’s A Smuggler’s Song) is Watch the Wall, My Darling by Jane Aiken Hodge (1), a Gothic suspense novel set during the Napoleonic Wars. I described it in my review as a tale of “smugglers, soldiers and spies, a crumbling abbey believed to be haunted, family secrets and an inheritance to be decided”.

The plot of Alex Preston’s Winchelsea (2) also features smuggling. Our heroine’s adoptive father is murdered by a gang of smugglers in the East Sussex town of Winchelsea and she and her brother set out to take revenge. The book is set in the 1740s and includes a subplot involving the Jacobites and Bonnie Prince Charlie.

The Masqueraders by Georgette Heyer (3) also takes place just after the Jacobite Rising of 1745. This was one of the first Heyer novels I read and although I’ve read better ones since, it still holds a special place in my heart. I loved the Georgian setting, the characters and the entertaining plot.

The idea of ‘masqueraders’ leads logically to The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas (4). This is the final volume in Dumas’ d’Artagnan series, which began with The Three Musketeers, and revolves around a plot involving a man imprisoned in the Bastille who bears a striking resemblance to the King of France. I always enjoy Dumas and this is one of the stronger novels in the series.

A book which shares a word in the title is The Iron King by Maurice Druon (5), the first book in Druon’s series Les Rois maudits (The Accursed Kings). The series tells the story of Philip IV of France and his descendants, a line of kings “cursed to the thirteenth generation” by the Grand Master of the Knights Templar, whom Philip sent to burn at the stake. I still have the last two books in the series to read – hopefully this year!

Another book which features a curse as part of the plot is Agatha Christie’s Endless Night (6). And the title of the book is also taken from a poem, bringing the chain full circle! The poem this time is William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence:

“Every Night and every Morn
Some to Misery are born.
Every Morn and every Night
Some are born to Sweet Delight.
Some are born to Sweet Delight,
Some are born to Endless Night.”

~

And that’s my chain for this month! My links have included: titles taken from poems, smugglers, Jacobites, masked men, the word ‘iron’ and curses.

In March we’ll be starting with Tom Lake by Ann Patchett.

It’s the first Saturday of the month – and of 2024 – 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 Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. I haven’t read it, but here’s what it’s about:

When Sam catches sight of Sadie at a crowded train station one morning he is catapulted straight back to childhood, and the hours they spent immersed in playing games.

Their spark is instantly reignited and sets off a creative collaboration that will make them superstars. It is the 90s, and anything is possible.

What comes next is a decades-long tale of friendship and rivalry, fame and art, betrayal and tragedy, perfect worlds and imperfect ones. And, above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love.

The title of the Zevin novel is a line from one of the most famous soliloquies in Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time.” In Elizabeth Bailey’s For One More Tomorrow (1), Sadie Grey is directing a production of Macbeth when she discovers that she has somehow conjured up the ghost of Macbeth himself…and he is not at all happy with the way he is being portrayed.

I didn’t immediately notice that as well as the Macbeth and ‘Tomorrow’ connections, both the Zevin and Bailey novels feature a character whose name is Sadie! So does At the Edge of the Orchard by Tracy Chevalier (2), although this is a completely different kind of novel, set in the 1830s and following the story of a family who are trying to establish an orchard in the Black Swamp region of Ohio.

I learned a lot about trees and apples from the Chevalier book – more than I knew I needed to know! Another book that features apples, but in a very different way, is For the Most Beautiful by Emily Hauser (3). This novel, the first in a trilogy inspired by the ‘golden apples’ from Greek mythology, is a retelling of the Trojan War from the perspectives of two female characters, Krisayis and Briseis. The other two books in the trilogy focus on Atalanta (For the Winner) and Hippolyta (For the Immortal).

The word ‘beautiful’ also appears in the title of Your Beautiful Lies by Louise Douglas (4), a novel set in a small mining town in Yorkshire during the miners’ strike of 1984. A crime takes place – a woman is murdered on the moors – but although the book does have a strong mystery element, I described it in my review as “difficult to classify as belonging to a particular genre, being a mixture of crime, romance, suspense and domestic drama”.

Mining also features heavily in the plot of Ross Poldark (5), the first book in Winston Graham’s Poldark series. Set in 18th century Cornwall, it begins with Ross returning home after a long absence to find that his father has died and the woman he loves is marrying his cousin. The rest of the book follows Ross as he tries to restore the family estate and open a new copper mine. I read this book in 2015 when a new adaptation was being shown on the BBC, but although I enjoyed it and intended to continue with the rest of the series, I still haven’t picked up the second book.

An author who is closely associated with Cornwall is Daphne du Maurier. Many of her novels are set there, but the one I’ve chosen to finish my chain is The Loving Spirit (6). Published in 1931 when she was just twenty-four years old, this was du Maurier’s first novel and tells the story of four generations of the Coombe family, who live in a fictional shipbuilding town on the Cornish coast. Although it’s not as strong as her later novels, I still enjoyed it. The title is taken from an Emily Brontë poem, Self-Interrogation, which provides a link back to the beginning of this chain – books with titles inspired by another author’s work.

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And that’s my chain for this month! My links have included: The word ‘tomorrow’, Macbeth, the name Sadie, apples, the word ‘beautiful’, mining and Cornwall.

In February we’ll be starting with the book we finished with this month – which for me is The Loving Spirit.

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 Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain. I haven’t read it and I’m not likely to, but here’s what it’s about:

After twenty-five years of ‘sex, drugs, bad behaviour and haute cuisine’, chef and novelist Anthony Bourdain has decided to tell all. From his first oyster in the Gironde to his lowly position as a dishwasher in a honky-tonk fish restaurant in Provincetown; from the kitchen of the Rainbow Room atop the Rockefeller Center to drug dealers in the East Village, from Tokyo to Paris and back to New York again, Bourdain’s tales of the kitchen are as passionate as they are unpredictable, as shocking as they are funny.

Using food and kitchens as my first link, John Saturnall’s Feast by Lawrence Norfolk (1) is set in the 17th century and tells the story of John Sandall, an orphan who is taken into the household of a wealthy nobleman, Sir William Fremantle. With his knowledge of food and ancient recipes, John is given the task of creating a meal to tempt Sir William’s daughter, who is refusing to eat as a protest against an arranged marriage. This is a complex, multi-layered novel with an unusual plot and a vivid portrayal of life in the kitchen!

The Feast by Margaret Kennedy (2) shares a word in the title, but is a very different book. Published in 1950, it follows a week in the lives of a group of guests who are staying in a hotel on the coast of Cornwall. We know from the beginning that by the end of the week the hotel will have been destroyed by a cliff collapsing on top of it, but we don’t know who will survive and who won’t. I really enjoyed this one; it’s one of my favourites so far by Margaret Kennedy.

Although it doesn’t form a big part of the plot, some of the characters in The Feast have traits that represent one of the seven deadly sins, which I thought was a clever touch. Anne Zouroudi’s Greek Detective series, which follows the investigations of the mysterious Hermes Diaktoros, also uses one of the seven sins as a theme for each novel. The Doctor of Thessaly (3) is the third book in the series, although they can be read in any order, and this one has ‘envy’ as its theme.

I haven’t read many authors whose surname begins with the letter Z, but one of them is Émile Zola. I’ve read three of his books so far and my favourite is Thérèse Raquin (4), the first one I read and a standalone novel which is not part of his longer Rougon-Macquart cycle. This is a very dark novel about two people who commit a terrible crime and the psychological effect this has on the rest of their lives.

I’m going to use a word in the title again for my next link, which leads me to 13, rue Thérèse by Elena Mauli Shapiro (5). This unusual and imaginative novel begins with a man discovering a box full of photographs, letters, postcards and other items that once belonged to Louise Brunet, a Frenchwoman who lived through both world wars. We are given a picture of each item, followed by a few pages of story describing the item’s significance and background, and gradually Louise’s history begins to unfold.

My final link uses the number 13. The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield (6) is the story of a young woman who agrees to write the biography of a reclusive author. It’s an entertaining read, clearly inspired by several classic Gothic novels, and I described it in my review as a tale of ‘Yorkshire moors, twins, mistaken identities, ghosts and governesses’.

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And that’s my chain for this month! My links have included: Kitchens, the word ‘Feast’, the seven deadly sins, author names beginning with Z, the name Thérèse and the number thirteen.

In January we’ll be starting with Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin.

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 Western Lane by Chetna Maroo.

Eleven-year-old Gopi has been playing squash since she was old enough to hold a racket. When her mother dies, her father enlists her in a quietly brutal training regimen, and the game becomes her world. Slowly, she grows apart from her sisters. Her life is reduced to the sport, guided by its the serve, the volley, the drive, the shot and its echo.

But on the court, she is not alone. She is with her pa. She is with Ged, a thirteen-year-old boy with his own formidable talent. She is with the players who have come before her. She is in awe.

An indelible coming-of-age story, Chetna Maroo’s first novel captures the ordinary and annihilates it with beauty. Western Lane is a valentine to innocence, to the closeness of sisterhood, to the strange ways we come to know ourselves and each other.

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I struggled to get started with this month’s chain; I don’t read many books about sports and couldn’t find any inspiration in the book’s description. Eventually, I decided to use the word ‘lane’ as my first link – another word for lane can be street, which leads me to The Crowded Street by Winifred Holtby (1). I loved this 1924 novel about a young woman searching for independence and happiness in a small Yorkshire village as World War I approaches.

The Holtby novel is set partly in Scarborough on the North Yorkshire coast. So is Big Sky by Kate Atkinson (2), the fifth and most recent novel in the Jackson Brodie crime series. It begins with a recreation of a naval battle on the lake in Scarborough’s Peasholm Park then moves on to other coastal towns such as Whitby and Bridlington where private investigator Jackson is on the trail of a client’s cheating husband. Like the other books in the series, this one is more about the characters than the crimes being committed, but I think that’s why I enjoy them so much.

From Kate Atkinson to a different author with the same first name: Kate Summerscale. I’ve read several of her books, but the one I’m going to link to here is The Haunting of Alma Fielding (3). This is a nonfiction book based on the true story of Alma Fielding who claims to be the victim of paranormal activity in 1930s London. Nandor Fodor of the International Institute for Psychical Research begins to investigate, but are there really poltergeists at work in the Fielding household or is it an elaborate fraud? I enjoyed this one but felt that Alma’s story wasn’t really substantial enough to fill a whole book.

Poltergeists also feature in The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters (4), which is set in an old country house in post-war Britain. This book is a work of fiction but, like the Summerscale one, the story is ambiguous – is Hundreds Hall really haunted or is there another explanation? We are given some answers, but the ending leaves a lot open to interpretation and I was still trying to make sense of it days later. Genuinely spooky and one of my favourites by Sarah Waters.

Another book with a shared word in the title is Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith (5), in which two men meet on a train and find themselves plotting two perfect murders. I read this classic psychological thriller earlier this year and enjoyed it, despite both main characters being very unlikeable, particularly the psychopathic Bruno! This was my first Patricia Highsmith book and I do plan to read more eventually.

Miranda, the heroine of M.M. Kaye’s Death in Berlin (6), is on a train journey at the beginning of the novel when one of the passengers is murdered. The mystery continues to deepen when Miranda arrives at her destination, Berlin, a city trying to recover in the aftermath of World War II. This is one of a series of Death In… suspense novels by Kaye, all set in different locations around the world. Death in Kashmir is my favourite, but I did love the portrayal of an eerie postwar Berlin in this one.

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And that’s my chain for November! My links have included: lanes and streets, Scarborough, authors with the name Kate, poltergeists, the word ‘Stranger’ and books set on trains.

In December we’ll be starting with Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain.