#6Degrees of Separation: From The End of the Affair to The Mirror Game

It’s the first Saturday of the month which means it’s time for 6 Degrees of Separation!

Here’s how it works: a book is chosen as a starting point by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.

Kate says: Books can be linked in obvious ways – for example, books by the same authors, from the same era or genre, or books with similar themes or settings. Or, you may choose to link them in more personal or esoteric ways: books you read on the same holiday, books given to you by a particular friend, books that remind you of a particular time in your life, or books you read for an online challenge. Join in by posting your own six degrees chain on your blog and adding the link in the comments section of each month’s post.   You can also check out links to posts on Twitter using the hashtag #6Degrees.

This month’s starting book is The End of the Affair by Graham Greene. It’s a book I read many years ago and concerns a novelist’s love affair with his friend’s wife begun during the London Blitz. When, without warning or explanation, she breaks off the relationship, he hires a private detective to find out the truth.

Actor Dirk Bogarde wrote the screenplay for a TV adaptation of a Graham Greene short story, May We Borrow Your Husband? A prolific author himself, Bogarde’s novel Jericho concerns a man who receives a cryptic letter of farewell from his estranged brother and sets out to unravel the complexities of his brother’s strange life.

In Finding Edith Pinsent by Hazel Ward, Netta Wilde is given the task of going through the diaries and possessions of the late Edith Pinsent and makes some surprising discoveries as a result.

The Girl From Bletchley Park by Kathleen McGurl also features a delve into the past, this time sparked by the discovery of forgotten photos of her grandmother as a young woman at Bletchley Park, a part of her life she had never spoken about.

There’s a Bletchley Park connection in The Reading Party by Fenella Gentleman, in which Cambridge Fellow Sarah Addleshaw uncovers surprising facts about Hugh Loxton, the Senior Fellow who has led the annual Reading Party trip to Cornwall for many years.

Cornwall is the setting for The Visitors by Caroline Scott in which young widow Esme Nicholls spends the summer in a rambling seaside house near St Ives hoping to learn more about her late husband Alec, who grew up in Penzance and died fighting in the First World War.

The Mirror Game by Guy Gardner also concerns a man, Adrian Harcourt, believed dead along with the rest of his company on the battlefield of Flanders during the First World War but who is spotted seven years later looking like he’s been living rough.

My chain has taken me from the Second World War to the aftermath of the First World War. Where did your chain take you?