#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.


The Museum of Modern LoveThis 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?
#6Degrees of Separation August 2024

#6Degrees of Separation – A book chain from Kairos to The Wager

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.


KairosThis month’s starting book is Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, trans. by Michael Hofmann, winner of the International Booker Prize 2024. As usual, it’s a book I haven’t read but the description – ‘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’ – makes me think it might be a book I’d enjoy.

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

The two main characters in Kairos meet on a bus in Berlin in 1986.  Staying with that mode of transport, in The Girl at the Back of the Bus by Suzette D. Harrison the famous act of defiance by Rosa Parks inspires three generations of black women to take control of their lives and fight the discrimination they face.

A young woman on a bus also features on the cover of A Complicated Matter by Anne Youngson.  Set in 1939, it tells the story of Rose Dunbar who is evacuated from her home on the island of Gibraltar to London.

More evacuees in The Last Lifeboat by Hazel Gaynor which tells the story of schoolteacher Alice King who volunteers to escort a group of British children being evacuated to Canada from WW2 Britain. When their boat is sunk by a German U-boat, a small group find themselves adrift in a lifeboat on the Atlantic Ocean.

In How To Be Brave by Louise Beech, a woman and her daughter, who has been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, find comfort in learning the wartime story of an ancestor who survived for fifty days in a lifeboat after his ship was sunk.

The Night Ship by Jess Kidd tells the story of a young girl, one of the passengers aboard the Dutch ship Batavia, which was wrecked on a small island off the coast of Western Australia in 1629.

Staying with shipwrecks, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann is the true story of the British vessel, HMS Wager, which was wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia in 1741 while on a secret mission to raid a Spanish treasure-filled galleon.

My transport related chain has taken me from Berlin to Patagonia. Where did your chain take you this month?
#6Degrees of Separation July 2024