6Degrees – Page 35 – 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 The Road by Cormac McCarthy, a book I’ve heard of but not read. I know it involves a father and son walking alone through a burned, post-apocalyptic America. That seems way too sombre a route to follow (if you pardon the pun) in the current circumstances, so I’m taking a more literal approach for my first link.

A road features prominently in A Long Way From Home by Peter Carey, which was shortlisted for The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction in 2019. The book features a couple who take part in the Redex trial, a motor race around Australia. Along the way, their navigator learns more about his aboriginal roots.

A growing awareness of the shocking treatment of aboriginal people also features in The Philosopher’s Daughters by Alison Booth in which two sisters, Harriet and Sarah, travel to the Australian outback at the end of the 19th century.

My Sister, Myself by Jill Treseder also involves two sisters, Katalin and Marika, who escape from Budapest to London in 1956 as Russian tanks brutally crush the revolution against the Communist regime.

Burning Cold by Lisa Lieberman is also set in Hungary in 1956. It involves the search by brother and sister, Gray and Cara, for a newly discovered member of their family – another brother, Zoltán – who has disappeared in the middle of the Hungarian revolution.

The disappearance of a family member is also the focus of The Missing Girl by Jenny Quintana. The book involves Anna’s search for the truth about what happened to her older sister, who went missing as a teenager thirty years before.

Finally, in The Storyteller by Pierre Jarawan, Samir leaves the safety of his family’s adopted home in Germany to travel to Beirut in an attempt to find his missing father. His only clues are an old photo and the bedtime stories his father used to tell him.

Where did your chain take you this month?

It’s the first Saturday of the month so it’s time for another 6 Degrees of Separation!

This month’s starting book is Stasiland by Anna Funder, a book I’ve heard of but not read. According to the book description, the author tells ‘extraordinary tales from the underbelly of the former East Germany’.

Stasi Winter by David Young is set in pre-unification East Germany where the secret police, the Stasi, still maintain a chilling influence over the lives of the population. It’s chilling in other respects too because the book is set in the ‘catastrophic winter’ of 1978/9.

There’s more catastrophic weather in The Rain Never Came by Lachlan Walter but this time it’s an extreme drought that has seen Australia descend into a post-apocalyptic nightmare.

Drought is also a feature of El Hacho by Luis Carrasco, in which olive farmer, Curro, sees his livelihood at risk from an unusually long spell without rain.

Staying with olives but with a more carefree tone is The Olive Garden Choir by Leah Fleming in which a variety of people who have made their homes on a fictional Greek island find solace in singing together.

Also set on a fictional Greek island is The Dancing Floor by John Buchan. A young man, Vernon Milburne becomes fascinated by the island’s myths but local superstitions turn to menace when his encounter with a beautiful woman results in obsession and adventure.

The final link in my chain is The House by the Loch by Kirsty Wark. In the book, two of the main characters, Walter and Jean, first meet on the dance floor.