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.

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.

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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.