This is the first time I have participated in Six Degrees of Separation, hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. Every month we are given the title of a book as a starting point and the idea is to link it to six other books 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.

I’ve seen other bloggers taking part in this every month and it always looks fun, so I thought I would try it myself. I picked a good month for my first attempt, as the opening book in the chain is one that I read and enjoyed just last year: The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith.

This is the first in a series of novels about Mma Precious Ramotswe, a woman who runs a detective agency in Botswana. Another book I remember enjoying which is also set in an African country is Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese.

Cutting for Stone tells the story of a surgeon’s twin sons who grow up in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and are raised by two doctors from the local hospital. This brings to mind another book about a doctor: A Country Doctor’s Notebook by Mikhail Bulgakov.

This is a fascinating and surprisingly funny book about a young, newly qualified doctor working at a small hospital in a remote Russian village. It’s the second book I’ve read by Mikhail Bulgakov; I also loved The Master and Margarita.

I remember feeling intimidated at the thought of tackling The Master and Margarita…until I picked it up and started to read. What a wonderful, original, unusual novel it is!

My next link is to another book with the word Master in the title. Master of Shadows by Neil Oliver.

Set during the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Master of Shadows is the first novel by historian and TV presenter Neil Oliver. Another historian who has recently started to write fiction is Ian Mortimer, so the next book on my list is one that I read a few months ago – The Outcasts of Time.

The Outcasts of Time is the story of two brothers who travel forward in time from 1348 to 1942, stopping in each century to see how things have changed. I have read a lot of books which feature time travel, but the obvious choice to finish my chain is H.G. Wells’ classic The Time Machine.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my first Six Degrees of Separation! It has taken me from a detective agency in Botswana to a futuristic world, visiting Ethiopia, Russia and the Byzantine Empire along the way. I wonder where the chain will lead me next month, when we’ll be starting with Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders.

Have you read any of the books in my chain? What did you think of them?