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.

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This month’s starting book is Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield. Published on 3rd March, it’s a book I haven’t read but, from what I can gather, it concerns a woman who returns from a deep-sea mission very different from the person she was before.

From a book recently published to one shortly to be published. Pod by Laline Paull is the story of Ea, a small spinner dolphin, who suffers from a type of deafness that means she cannot master the spinning rituals that unite her pod of dolphins.

Continuing with characters who experience the world differently, in Planet of Clay by Samar Yazbek, Rima’s senses her environment (the war-torn city of Damascus) in terms of colours rather than words and expresses herself through drawings.

Rima’s favourite book is the much-loved classic, The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

The novel The Prince of the Skies by Antonio Iturbe is the story of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry who as well as being an author was an accomplished pilot. Along with fellow aviators, he helped to pioneer new mail routes across the globe carrying mail to far flung places, risking life and limb in the process.

Other pilots who carried out dangerous missions were the women of the Air Transport Auxilary during the Second World War. They ferried new, repaired and damaged military aircraft of all types between factories, assembly plants and airfields. Classed as non-operational flights, they carried no weapons and were therefore at risk from enemy fighters. ATA ferry pilots feature in A Sunlit Weapon by Jacqueline Winspear, the latest instalment in her Maisie Dobbs historical crime series.

An aviatrix of a different kind features in one of the stories in A Registry Of My Passage Upon The Earth by Daniel Mason. In ‘On the Cause of Winds and Waves’, a female balloonist witnesses an odd feature in the sky but because of her gender is not taken seriously by the scientific community.

My chain has taken me from sea to sky. 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 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.

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This month’s starting book is The End of the Affair by Graham Greene. It’s a book I read many years ago and concerns a novelist’s love affair with his friend’s wife begun during the London Blitz. When, without warning or explanation, she breaks off the relationship, he hires a private detective to find out the truth.

Actor Dirk Bogarde wrote the screenplay for a TV adaptation of a Graham Greene short story, May We Borrow Your Husband? A prolific author himself, Bogarde’s novel Jericho concerns a man who receives a cryptic letter of farewell from his estranged brother and sets out to unravel the complexities of his brother’s strange life.

In Finding Edith Pinsent by Hazel Ward, Netta Wilde is given the task of going through the diaries and possessions of the late Edith Pinsent and makes some surprising discoveries as a result.

The Girl From Bletchley Park by Kathleen McGurl also features a delve into the past, this time sparked by the discovery of forgotten photos of her grandmother as a young woman at Bletchley Park, a part of her life she had never spoken about.

There’s a Bletchley Park connection in The Reading Party by Fenella Gentleman, in which Cambridge Fellow Sarah Addleshaw uncovers surprising facts about Hugh Loxton, the Senior Fellow who has led the annual Reading Party trip to Cornwall for many years.

Cornwall is the setting for The Visitors by Caroline Scott in which young widow Esme Nicholls spends the summer in a rambling seaside house near St Ives hoping to learn more about her late husband Alec, who grew up in Penzance and died fighting in the First World War.

The Mirror Game by Guy Gardner also concerns a man, Adrian Harcourt, believed dead along with the rest of his company on the battlefield of Flanders during the First World War but who is spotted seven years later looking like he’s been living rough.

My chain has taken me from the Second World War to the aftermath of the First World War. Where did your chain take you?