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?
Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl.
