6Degrees – Page 29 – What Cathy Read Next…

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 Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss. Subtitled ‘The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation’, in the book the author argues that it is time to look at commas and semicolons and see them for the wonderful and necessary things they are.

Gyles Brandreth takes a similarly non-nonsense attitude in his book Have You Eaten Grandma? which is described as a ‘brilliantly funny tirade on grammar…[and] the linguistic horrors of our times’.

Gyles’ son, Benet Brandreth, as well as being an authority on Shakespeare is also a novelist. His series of historical novels that started with The Spy of Venice and continued with The Assassin of Verona imagine what William Shakespeare might have got up to in his so-called “lost years”.

I’m not going to go for the obvious link to Hamnet as I used that last month. Instead, my next link is to another book set in Venice, Death in Venice by Thomas Mann. The film version starred Dirk Bogarde (as pictured below on the cover of the Penguin edition). Bogarde, as well as being an award-winning actor, was an accomplished author and in his book, Great Meadow, he recalls his idyllic childhood in Sussex in the late 1920s and 1930s.

Also set in the years before the Second World War is All Among the Barley by Melissa Harrison. Set on a farm in Suffolk it features a girl on the cusp of adulthood. It made the ‘Academy Recommends’ list but not the longlist for The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2019.

A book that did make the longlist was The Wanderers by Tim Pears, the second book in his West Country trilogy featuring young Leo Sercombe who falls in with a band of gypsies and travels the countryside with them, and then later on his own.

My chain has taken me from proponents of precision in punctuation to a book featuring a much less rules-based way of life. Where did your chain take you?

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

This month’s starting book is winner of The Stella Prize 2021, The Bass Rock by Evie Wyld. Once again, it’s a book I haven’t read but from the blurb I understand it features three women from different periods of time all of whom are linked to the place of the title, a landscape feature off the coast of Scotland.

The Stella Prize is a literary award that celebrates Australian women’s writing. Its UK equivalent is the Women’s Prize for Fiction. This year’s winner won’t be announced until 7th July 2021 but the 2020 winner was Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell.

Hamnet involves the death of the son of a man who is never referred to by name but is clearly William Shakespeare. Martyr by Rory Clements is the first in the author’s historical crime series featuring William Shakespeare’s older brother John, who turns detective to investigate a murder and an assassination plot.

Another character combining their usual occupation – in this case, cleaner – with that of detective is Stella Darnell (yes, another Stella) the protagonist of Lesley Thomson’s ‘The Detective’s Daughter’ crime series. The latest addition to the series is The Distant Dead.

Staying with characters named Stella, Stella by Takis Würger is set in wartime Berlin. Although the story is fictional, Stella herself is based on a real historical character.

A real-life Stella who turned author in later life is Dame Stella Rimington, former head of MI5. Present Danger, the fifth book in her series featuring MI5 intelligence officer Liz Carlyle, sees Liz despatched to Northern Ireland to monitor breakaway Republican groups who never accepted the peace process.

An earlier period in Ireland’s history features in Dublin’s Girl by Eimear Lawlor in which its heroine witnesses events such as Sinn Féin’s victory in the 1918 election, the establishment of an independent parliament (the Dail Eireann) and, eventually, the birth of the Irish Free State.

My chain this month has taken me on a tour of the United Kingdom with a brief detour to Berlin, finishing with a visit to the Emerald Isle. Where did your chain take you?