Tag: 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 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 Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain. One of these days, the starting book will be one I’ve read but it ain’t happened yet and certainly hasn’t this month. Subititled ‘Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly’ the book is described as a tell all story of ‘sex, drugs, bad behaviour and haute cuisine’. Unfortunately I can’t think of anything I’m less likely to choose to read.

To start I’m going to take the obvious route of foodstuffs, with an emphasis on sweetness.  Sugar in the Blood by Andrea Stuart in which the author explores her own family history starting with an ancestor who owned a sugar plantation in Barbados.

Staying in the Caribbean, Sugar Money by Jane Harris is the story of two brothers, Emile and Lucien, who are charged with travelling from Martinique to Grenada to smuggle back a group of slaves taken by English invaders.

Slavery and the campaign for its abolition is the backdrop to historical crime novel, Blood & Sugar by Laura Shepherd-Robinson.

Blood & Sugar starts with the discovery of an unidentified body which is also the case in In Two Minds by Alis Hawkins, the second book in the ‘Teifi Valley Coroner’ historical crime series featuring Harry Probert-Lloyd whose career as a barrister has been curtailed by partial blindness.

The Great Darkness by Jim Kelly also features a protagonist with impaired vision. Inspector Eden Brooke’s experiences during World War One damaged his eyesight, leaving him extremely sensitive to light. He’s also an insomniac and in his nightly wanderings encounters other ‘nighthawks’, individuals whose job or inclination mean they inhabit the streets or buildings of Cambridge while most of the population are asleep.

Another character who works in the hours of darkness is Jonathan Pine in The Night Manager by John le Carré. Employed as the night manager of a luxury hotel in Zurich, for reasons of personal vengeance, he becomes involved in a British intelligence operation.

My chain has taken me from a restaurant kitchen to a hotel reception. Where did your chain take you this month?

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 Western Lane by Chetna Maroo which is on the shortlist for the Booker Prize 2023, the winner of which will be announced on 26th November. As usual, it’s a book I haven’t read but the publishers describe it as ‘a novel about grief, sisterhood, and a young athlete‘s struggle to transcend herself’.

I’m going to take a very literal route for my first link – the word ‘western’. As it happens, The Western Wind by Samantha Harvey was also shortlisted for a literary prize, in this case the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2019.

The eventual winner of the prize was The Long Take by Robin Robertson which tells the story – in a combination of prose and free verse – of a Canadian war veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder who feels unable to return and instead walks the streets of Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York.

In Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney, 85-year-old Lillian wanders through 1980s Manhattan on New Year’s Eve recalling her eventful life and encountering people from different walks of life. The character of Lillian is inspired by a real person – Margaret Fishback – who, like her fictional counterpart, was an advertising copywriter. In fact Fishback was the highest-paid female copywriter in the world in the 1930s.

The death of an advertising executive is the starting point for Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L. Sayers, the eighth book in her series featuring aristocratic detective, Lord Peter Wimsey.

An advertisement in a local paper – “A murder is announced and will take place on Friday, October 29th, at Little Paddocks at 6.30 p.m.” – is the starting point for a crime novel featuring another famous fictional detective. In A Murder Is Announced by Agatha Christie, Jane Marple investigates what seems at first to be a hoax but which turns deadly serious.

An advertisement in a local shop in a small village in West Cork – “Wanted. Housekeeper.” – features in The Well of Saint Nobody by Neil Jordan. Tara answers the advertisement placed by internationally renowned pianist William Barrow, a man it turns out she has met three times before. The encounters have changed her life but he recalls nothing of them.

My chain has taken me from London to Ireland via New York.  Where did your chain take you this month?