Six Degrees of Separation is a meme hosted by Kate over at Books Are My Favourite and Best. It works like this: each month a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six others to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the titles on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.
This month we’re starting with Paul Lynch’s 2023 Booker Prize winning Prophet Song set in a dystopian Ireland.
Prophet Song was on my Booker wish list as was Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain which won the 2020 Booker.
Stuart is a fashion designer as is Tom Ford who directed an impressive screen version of Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man.
Which starred Colin Firth who recently co-starred in Supernova with Stanley Tucci, author of Taste
Tucci is married to a literary agent as was Julian Barnes who wrote about losing his wife in Levels of Life.
One of my favourite authors, Amy Bloom wrote about her own widowhood in In Love. She accompanied her beloved husband to Zurich for an assisted death.
Which is also the subject of palliative care nurse Steven Amsterdam’s novel, The Easy Way Out.
This month’s Six Degrees has taken me from an authoritarian, near future Ireland to a novel about assisted dying. Part of the fun of this meme is comparing the very different routes other bloggers take from each month’s starting point. If you’re interested, you can follow it on Twitter with the hashtag #6Degrees, check out the links over at Kate’s blog or perhaps even join in.
