#6Degrees of Separation – A book chain from The Museum of Modern Love to Sick Heart River

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 Museum of Modern Love by Heather Rose which won Australian literary award, the Stella Prize in 2017. As usual, it’s a book I haven’t read – or even heard of – but I understand it depicts how various characters, including a film composer whose wife is dying, interact with a work by Serbian performance artist Mariana Abramovic, entitled The Artist is Present.

Links from each title in the chain will take you to my review or the book description on Goodreads.

Staying with museums, Meet Me at the Museum by Anne Youngson concerns a correspondence between an English farmer’s wife and the curator of a Danish museum. It starts with an enquiry about one of the exhibits,  the Tollund Man, the mummified corpse of a 5th century man found in a bog in Denmark.

“The Tollund Man” is one of the poems in Seamus Heaney’s collection, Wintering Out, published in 1972.

Three Martini Afternoons at the Ritz by Gail Crowther explores the relationship between Heaney’s wife, Sylvia Plath, and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Anne Sexton.

Three-Martini Lunch is the title of a novel by Suzanne Rindell who also wrote Eagle & Crane. It tells the story of two aerial stuntmen in an American flying circus, one of whom is a Japanese immigrant whose family is interned during World War 2.

More aerial exploits feature in The Prince of the Skies by Antonio Iturbe which is based on the extraordinary life and mysterious death of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of the much-loved classic, The Little Prince. It was written near the end of his life and published posthumously.

Also completed shortly before his death and published posthumously is Sick Heart River by John Buchan. Diagnosed with tuberculosis and with no prospect of recovery, Sir Edward Leithen seeks to give purpose to the last few months of his life by embarking on a search for a young man who has gone missing in northern Canada.

My chain has embraced art and literature.  Where did your chain take you this month?