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 Orbital by Samantha Harvey. I haven’t read it and it doesn’t sound like my usual sort of book, but so many people have loved it that I’m starting to think I’ll have to at least try it. Here’s what it’s about:

A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.

Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction.

The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part – or protective – of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?

I’ll start with a book I have read by Samantha Harvey, The Western Wind (1). This is a mystery novel set in a small English village in 1491 and taking place over a period of four days. Unusually, the story is told in reverse, beginning on the fourth day and then moving backwards in time.

Another novel written in reverse is The Night Watch by Sarah Waters (2). This is one of my favourite books by Waters and follows the stories of four people during and after World War II, introducing us to the characters in 1947 before moving back in time to 1944 and then 1941.

The word ‘watch’ also appears in the title of Watch the Lady by Elizabeth Fremantle (3). This is a novel about Penelope Devereux, 16th century noblewoman and sister of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, a favourite of Elizabeth I’s. Penelope is thought to be the inspiration for the poet Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella.

The name Penelope leads me to my next book, The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood (4). This is a retelling of the events of the Odyssey from the perspectives of Penelope and the twelve maids who were hanged by her son, Telemachus. The sections narrated by the maids are written in a different style every time – a poem, a ballad, a lecture and even a trial.

Cuddy by Benjamin Myers (5) is also written in a range of styles including a narrative poem and a ghost story told through diary entries. The separate sections of the book all add up to paint a picture of the life and legacy of the Anglo-Saxon monk St Cuthbert, sometimes known by the nickname Cuddy.

My final link is a simple one – another author with the name Benjamin. Well, actually Benjamin Black is a pseudonym of the Irish author John Banville. He has written a number of crime novels under the Black name, including the Quirke series about a 1950s pathologist and a standalone mystery, Prague Nights (6), set in 16th century Prague.

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And that’s my first chain of 2025! My links included Samantha Harvey books, novels with reverse timelines, the word ‘watch’, characters called Penelope, books written in mixtures of styles and authors with the name Benjamin.

In February we’ll be starting with Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos.

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 Sandwich by Catherine Newman, as usual a book I haven’t read. I don’t have any plans to read it, but here’s what it’s about:

For the past two decades, Rocky has looked forward to her family’s yearly escape. Their rustic beach-town rental has been the site of sweet memories, its quirky furniture and mismatched pots and pans greeted like old friends.

Now, sandwiched between her children who are adult enough to be fun but still young enough to need her, and her parents who are alive and healthy, Rocky wants to preserve this golden moment forever. This one precious week when everything is in balance; everything is in flux.

But every family has its secrets and hers is no exception.

With her body in open revolt and surprises invading her peaceful haven, the perfectly balanced seesaw of Rocky’s life is tipping towards change…

I wasn’t sure how to get started with this month’s chain. I seem to have used food-related links a few times lately, so wanted something different. Sandwich is being marketed as ‘The NYT bestseller from the author of Richard & Judy Book Club pick, We All Want Impossible Things’ so I looked to see which other books had been part of the Richard & Judy Book Club over the last year or two and noticed The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels by Janice Hallett (1). I love Hallett’s books, although I know they’re not for everyone. This one is about a cult led by a man who calls himself the Angel Gabriel and is written in the form of emails, letters, WhatsApp messages, and even excerpts from books and film scripts.

A simpler link next, using a shared word in the title. Less than Angels (2) was the first Barbara Pym novel I read and I enjoyed it, although I’ve since read others by her that I liked better. The book was published in 1955 and tells the story of a group of anthropology students at a London research centre. I read it for a Barbara Pym Reading Week hosted by two fellow bloggers in 2013.

Another author I tried for the first time thanks to an event hosted by a blogger was Margaret Kennedy – I read her The Constant Nymph (3) for a Reading Week a year later in 2014. Again, it wasn’t a favourite but I liked it enough to read more of her work. The ‘nymph’ of the title is Tessa, the daughter of Albert Sanger, a musician who lives in a chalet in the Tyrol with his large family known as ‘Sanger’s circus’.

Part of The Unicorn Hunt by Dorothy Dunnett (4) is also set in the Tyrol. This is the fifth book in Dunnett’s House of Niccolo series and follows the rise in fortunes of Nicholas de Fleury, whom we first meet as a dyer’s apprentice in 15th century Bruges. The series takes us all over Europe and Africa and I thoroughly enjoyed all eight books.

Big Sky by Kate Atkinson (5) is also number five in a series, in this case the Jackson Brodie series. In this book, private investigator Jackson is on the trail of a client’s cheating husband when he encounters a desperate man standing on the edge of a cliff. Like the others in the series, this one is more about the characters than the mystery or the crimes being committed, but I think that’s why I enjoy them so much. I still have the latest book in the series waiting to be read.

My final link is to another book by an author whose name is Kate. The Wild Girl by Kate Forsyth (6) is the story of Dortchen Wild, a young woman who grows up next door to the Grimm family in the small German kingdom of Hessen-Cassel. The Grimms have two sons, Jakob and Wilhem, who of course become known as the Brothers Grimm. The novel explores how they collected their famous fairy tales and the role Dortchen may have played in this.

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And that’s my chain for December! My links have included: the Richard and Judy Book Club, the word ‘angels’, reading weeks, the Tyrol, the fifth book in a series and authors called Kate.

In January, we’ll be starting with the 2024 Booker Prize winner, Orbital by Samantha Harvey.

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 Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. As usual, it’s a book I haven’t read, but here’s what it’s about:

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties – successful, competent and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women – his enduring first love Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude – a period of desire, despair and possibility – a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.

The description of Ivan as a ‘competitive chess player’ makes me think of Adam Strauss, a character in Close to Death by Anthony Horowitz (1). Adam is a chess grandmaster and he and his neighbours become suspects in the murder of Giles Kenworthy, who has been making life difficult for them all since moving into their quiet London street. This is the fifth in the Hawthorne and Horowitz series, in which the author uses himself as a character in the books.

Another author who appears as a character in his own books is Akimitsu Takagi. I loved The Noh Mask Murder (2), which I read earlier this year in a new English translation by Jesse Kirkwood. First published in 1949, this is a very enjoyable locked room mystery and I found it interesting to learn about Japan in the post-war period, as well as the different types of masks used in Japanese theatre.

Next, a simple link using a shared word in the title. The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas (3) is the final book in the d’Artagnan series which begins with The Three Musketeers. A lot of people go straight from the first to the last without reading the middle books, but I would recommend not skipping any of them. In The Man in the Iron Mask, d’Artagnan and his three friends, Athos, Porthos and Aramis, become involved in a plot to free a prisoner from the Bastille who closely resembles the King of France.

The word Bastille leads me straight to The Bastille Spy by CS Quinn (4), a fast-paced historical thriller set during the French Revolution and featuring a female spy, Attica Morgan. I described this in my review as ‘a cross between The Scarlet Pimpernel, James Bond and Pirates of the Caribbean’. It’s a book not to be taken too seriously and I’m sure a lot of readers will find it fun, but it wasn’t really for me and I haven’t continued with the sequel.

I’ve read and reviewed several other books by authors with the surname Quinn (Kate Quinn, Frances Quinn and Anthony Quinn). Apart from the Quinns, the only other author I’ve read and reviewed on my blog whose name begins with a Q is Sarah Quigley, who wrote The Conductor (5). This is a fascinating novel about the conductor Karl Eliasberg who is given the task of performing the Seventh Symphony by Shostakovich to raise morale during the Siege of Leningrad.

In Murder to Music by Margaret Newman (6), a conductor is shot dead during a choir’s performance of a new mass. Detective Superintendent Simon Hudson happens to be present in the audience and begins to investigate. However, his own girlfriend, Delia, is on the choir committee and can’t be ruled out as a suspect! This entertaining 1959 novel could have been the start of a new mystery series, but Newman changed direction and began writing romance and family sagas under other pseudonyms.

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And that’s my chain for November. My links included: competitive chess players; authors using themselves as characters; the word ‘mask’; the Bastille; Q authors; and conductors. Intermezzo is a musical term, meaning ‘a short connecting instrumental movement’, so by finishing with Murder to Music I have managed to bring the chain full circle!

In December we’ll be starting with Sandwich by Catherine Newman.

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.

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 the 2024 winner of the International Booker Prize, Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (translated by Michael Hofmann). I haven’t read it, but here’s what it’s about:

Berlin. 11 July 1986. They meet by chance on a bus. She is a young student, he is older and married. Theirs is an intense and sudden attraction, fuelled by a shared passion for music and art, and heightened by the secrecy they must maintain. But when she strays for a single night he cannot forgive her and a dangerous crack forms between them, opening up a space for cruelty, punishment and the exertion of power. And the world around them is changing too: as the GDR begins to crumble, so too do all the old certainties and the old loyalties, ushering in a new era whose great gains also involve profound loss.

From a prize-winning German writer, this is the intimate and devastating story of the path of two lovers through the ruins of a relationship, set against the backdrop of a seismic period in European history.

I struggled to get started with this month’s chain. I know I have already used Berlin as a link in several previous chains, so I wanted to do something different. Eventually I decided to go with another book with a one-word title beginning with K: Kindred by Octavia E. Butler (1). This is a fascinating novel exploring slavery on a Maryland plantation through the eyes of a woman from 1976 who travels back in time to the 1800s.

Another time travel novel, also with a one-word title, is Mariana by Susanna Kearsley (2), although the setting is quite different. Our heroine, Julia Beckett, moves into a lonely farmhouse and finds that her life has become linked with the life of a woman who lived there centuries earlier, during the aftermath of the English Civil War. This was one of my first Susanna Kearsley novels and still a favourite.

Staying with women’s names, my next link is to Theodora by Stella Duffy (3). This novel is set in 6th century Constantinople and tells the story of Empress Theodora, wife of Justinian I. Theodora begins life as an actress and entertainer, before rising to become one of the most powerful women in the Byzantine Empire.

Booth by Karen Joy Fowler (4) also has a theatrical theme (and another one-word title). I loved this fictional biography of the 19th century theatrical family, the Booths, which focuses not just on the infamous John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln, but also on his parents, brothers and sisters.

Junius Brutus Booth and Edwin Booth were renowned Shakespearean actors, which leads me to a play by William Shakespeare himself: Macbeth (5). I could have picked any play here, but my reasons for selecting Macbeth are simple – it’s one of the few Shakespeare plays I’ve actually posted about on my blog and, most importantly, it has a one-word title which keeps that theme going throughout my chain!

The three witches in Macbeth are referred to as the ‘weyward sisters’ in Shakespeare’s First Folio (and later, the ‘weird sisters’) so my final link is to Weyward by Emilia Hart (6). In this novel, Hart explores the stories of women from three generations of the same family who are connected through witchcraft and the power of nature.

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And that’s my chain for July! My links have included titles beginning with K, time travel, women’s names, acting, Shakespeare and witches. As an extra challenge to myself I only used books with one-word titles in this month’s chain.

In August we’ll be starting with The Museum of Modern Love by Heather Rose.

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 a Japanese novel, Butter by Asako Yuzuki. I haven’t read it and probably won’t, but here’s what it’s about:

Gourmet cook Manako Kajii sits in Tokyo Detention Centre convicted of the serial murders of lonely businessmen, who she is said to have seduced with her delicious home cooking. The case has captured the nation’s imagination but Kajii refuses to speak with the press, entertaining no visitors. That is, until journalist Rika Machida writes a letter asking for her recipe for beef stew and Kajii can’t resist writing back.

Rika, the only woman in her news office, works late each night, rarely cooking more than ramen. As the visits unfold between her and the steely Kajii, they are closer to a masterclass in food than journalistic research. Rika hopes this gastronomic exchange will help her soften Kajii but it seems that she might be the one changing. With each meal she eats, something is awakening in her body, might she and Kaji have more in common than she once thought?

Inspired by the real case of the convicted con woman and serial killer, “The Konkatsu Killer”, Asako Yuzuki’s Butter is a vivid, unsettling exploration of misogyny, obsession, romance and the transgressive pleasures of food in Japan.

Butter is a dairy product, which makes me think of Nick Davenant, a character in Bee Ridgway’s The River of No Return (1) who owns a dairy farm in Vermont and is anxiously awaiting a visit from the cheese inspector at the beginning of the book. Nick is not just a dairy farmer, however – he is also a time traveller and was once an English nobleman who fought in the Napoleonic Wars. I think this book was intended to be the first in a series, but a sequel has never appeared.

Next is a simple link to another book with ‘river’ in the title: River of Stars by Guy Gavriel Kay (2). This novel is set in an alternate world based on China during the time of the Song Dynasty. Although Kay’s books are often described as historical fantasy, there are very few actual fantasy elements in this one, apart from some mentions of the spirits and fox-women who are part of Chinese myth.

Fox spirits also feature heavily in The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo (3), set in Manchuria in 1908. The novel follows the dual stories of an elderly private detective investigating a suspicious death and a white fox spirit who has taken the form of a human woman while she searches for the man who killed her daughter. I found this book very slow, but enjoyed the details of Chinese myth and foklore.

The title character in the Yangsze Choo novel is called Snow, so my next book is one in which snow features heavily in the plot: The Sittaford Mystery by Agatha Christie (4). The village of Sittaford is cut off by snow, making it the perfect setting for a murder mystery to unfold. This is a wonderful standalone Christie novel and I loved the heroine, Emily Trefusis.

Like my edition of The Sittaford Mystery, Benighted by J.B. Priestley (5) also has a picture of a house on the cover. A married couple and their friend get caught in a storm while driving through the Welsh countryside one night and take shelter in a crumbling old mansion inhabited by a very strange family! This was my first book by Priestley and I’m sure I’ll be looking for another one.

Benighted was published in 1927, so the final book in my chain is another published in that same year. The Land of Green Ginger by Winifred Holtby (6) is about a missionary’s daughter who is born in South Africa but comes to England to be raised by her aunts in a small rural community in Yorkshire. I’ve read nearly all of Holtby’s novels now and this is probably my least favourite, but it still explores some interesting topics.

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And that’s my chain for June! My links have included: Dairy products, the word ‘river’, fox-women, snow, pictures of houses and the year 1927.

In July we’ll be starting with Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck.