Category: 6Degrees

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 #6Degrees 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 X using the hashtag #6Degrees.

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This month’s starting book is Seascraper by Benjamin Wood, a book – for once – I’ve read, and which I highly recommend. Links from each title will take you to my review or the book description on Goodreads.

Seascraper‘s protagonist is twenty-year-old Thomas Flett who, like his grandfather before him, makes a living as a ‘shanker’, scraping for shrimp along the shoreline of the (fictional) coastal town of Longferry.

The Geometer Lobachevsky by Adrian Duncan features another traditional shoreline activity, the harvesting of seaweed by the inhabitants of a small island in the Shannon estuary in the 1950s. The book’s main character, Nikolai Lobachevsky, arrives in Ireland to help with surveying peat bogs in preparation for the provision of electricity to rural areas of Ireland.

In This Is Happiness by Niall Williams the small Irish village of Faha is also awaiting the arrival of mains electricity, paving the way for modern appliances such as refrigerators and toasters that initially bemuse the locals.

SPIT by David Brennan is also set in a small Irish village, the eponymous Spit. An unseen witness to everything that goes on in the village, and the book’s predominant narrator, is a ghost known as the Spook of Spit.

Another book narrated from beyond the grave is The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. Susie Salmon, murdered when she was fourteen years old, watches from heaven as life on earth continues without her.

Saoirse Ronan played Susie in the film adaptation of The Lovely Bones. She also played the part of pioneering palaeontologist and avid fossil collector Mary Anning in the film version of Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier.

Mary Anning was born in Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast which is also the setting for The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles.

My chain has taken me from the seaside to… the seaside! Where did your chain take you?

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 #6Degrees 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 X using the hashtag #6Degrees.

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This month’s starting book is We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. As is often the case, it’s a book I haven’t read although I have read another of her books, The Haunting of Hill House, which is similarly suitable for this time of year. Links from each title will take you to my review .

I’m taking a fairly obvious route for my first link with another book with the word ‘castle’ in the title, Castle Gay by John Buchan. (This year is the 150th anniversary of his birth.) There are no ghosts but there is a besieged Scottish manor house and a gang of baddies who are not only foreigners but – even worse – possibly Bolsheviks. 

In The Women of the Castle by Jessica Shattuck, as Nazi Germany faces defeat, Marianne, the widow of a resister murdered in the failed 1944 plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, returns to the castle stronghold of her husband’s ancestors and attempts to uphold a promise she made: to find and protect the widows of the other conspirators.

Magda, the main character in Hitler’s Taster by V. S. Alexander is given the task of preventing Hitler’s assassination, becoming one of the women employed to taste his food to check for poison. 

In The Book of Secrets by Anna Mazzola, Sicilian midwife Girolama possesses the recipe, handed down through generations of women, for a ‘remedy’ distributed via a network of female associates to women in need of escape from abusive marriages.

In The Binding by Bridget Collins, it’s not husbands people seek to escape from but painful or treacherous memories. Once their stories have been told and bound between the pages of a book, the slate is wiped clean and their memories lose the power to hurt or haunt them.

Staying with the theme of memory loss, in The Book of Forgotten Authors by Christopher Fowler the author explores the backstories of ninety-nine authors who, once hugely popular, have all but disappeared from our shelves.

My chain has taken me from besieged castles to. . . oh dear, I forget. Where did your chain take you?