Six Degrees of Separation – From Pyrenees to Pennines

Six Degrees of Separation: From Wild Dark Shore to Island Dreams

On the first Saturday of every month, a book is chosen as a starting point 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: Books are my Favourite and Best

This month’s chain starts with Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy. I’m fourth in a queue of readers at the library waiting to borrow this book. Here’s the first sentence of the book’s resume. ‘Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny weather-lashed island that is home to the world’s largest seed bank.’

So I’m going with the sea for all the books in my chain this month. I’m going to try to dodge books I’ve showcased before, and that I know many of you have also recommended. So no Clear by Carys Davies, no Seascraper by Benjamin Wood. Or James Rebanks’ The Place of Tides, which Kate has just reviewed.

In fact, let’s not start with a novel at all. Let’s celebrate the fish that so often feed us – specifically here, the fish round the British coast, in Silver Shoals by Charles Rangeley- Wilson. I was entirely and unexpectedly engaged by this book, an exploration of our nation’s iconic fish: cod, carp, eels, salmon and herring. This is a story of the fish themselves; of fishermen; of the consequences of greed and the way back from it; of geology; meteorology; our nation’s social history as it relates to food and farming; of corruption and political will. It combines serious discussion of issues with good yarns about the fishermen who took Rangeley -Wilson fishing with them, whether on week-long voyages on trawlers, or half day sorties to the local river bank. He travelled north south east and west in quest of fish and their stories, and produced an absorbing account which I read in record time because I was so enthralled by all the threads of the story Charles Rangeley-Wilson told.

Those Silver Shoals don’t include tuna. Kings of Their Own Ocean: Tuna, Obsession, and the Future of Our Seas by Karen Pinchin talks of little else. This is quite a story. It details the history of man’s love of eating tuna, from way before Roman times, to the present day, when the Japanese have cornered much of the market, while teaching the world to enjoy their own particular obsession with the freshest, choicest tuna flesh. The book details a history of overfishing, of trying to understand the tuna’s migration patterns, of political interests and manoeuvres and focusses on particular individuals who have been prominent in the story, such as tuna-tagging supremo Al Anderson. An engaging book, reeling in this non-scientist who has no prior knowledge of the industry: and who doesn’t even eat tuna (even less likely to now).

So now to a novel about fishing. About whaling to be exact. The North Water by Ian McGuire. This is a gritty story set largely in a 19th century whaling ship. There’s violence, brutality, bad language, bowel movements a-plenty, but it doesn’t feel gratuitous. Patrick Sumner has – we eventually discover – left the British Army in disgrace and his options are few. He becomes a ship’s surgeon on the whaling ship, and finds that a hard and desperate life becomes even worse as the ship and its crew battle against an arctic winter and a particularly brutal and amoral member of the crew. An involving and gripping story that recreates a world I can only be grateful not to be a part of. I saw a good and faithful TV adaptation of this book some years ago. Recommended.

Audrey Magee’s The Colony might have been a good choice to begin my chain. We’re in Ireland in 1979, on a small, sparsely populated and isolated island, whose inhabitants have only recently started to learn and use English. Two visitors come to spend their summers there. Mr. Lloyd is a painter who wants to explore the landscape. He’s rude and entitled, but interesting to young islander James who has ambitions to go to art school. Masson, known as JP, is a French academic, keen to preserve and promote the Irish language, whether the inhabitants want it or not. Each chapter is interspersed with a terse newspaper-like account of a sectarian murder on the mainland, whether of a Catholic or a Protestant. At first these almost seem an irrelevance. Gradually, the penny drops that these incidents are deeply rooted in the history of the English towards their Irish ‘colony’, and do much to explain the largely hostile feelings both of the islanders and its two visitors. The book paints a picture of an island in many ways left behind, whose characters still struggle to find their place in the world, as indeed do the two visitors. A book to provoke thought long after the last page has been turned.

Let’s turn to another Irish island in John Boyne’s Water, part of his Elements quartet. We meet a woman in middle years who has just fled to live on a fairly remote Irish island, changed her name and as far as possible her appearance. Why? Only slowly do we find out. Her husband’s crimes reflect on her: the world assumed she had enabled them – and, she believes, one even greater tragedy. She has done her best to vanish. She meets a few characters who are also uncomfortable with their lives, making relationships with some. Slowly she regains the strength of character necessary to reject her husband and to renew her relationship with her daughter. This book deftly charts her slow, but steady steps to recovery.

I’ll finish where I began, with non-fiction. And with the subject of the starter book and two of my other choices: islands, in Island Dreams, by Gavin Francis.This is a beautifully produced book. On heavy paper, with blue and black ink, the text is allowed generous space to breathe. As well, the text is interspersed – also generously – with maps old and new illustrating the outlines of islands he visits and discusses. These are the only illustrations. Often the subject of the map will be – for instance – the usual trade routes using the islands illustrated. So this is a book to savour and linger over, returning several times to the maps on display. Gavin Francis has often been able to combine his passion for island-hopping with his career, working in those places he has most wanted to visit. He appreciates the way that islands can offer both isolation, and yet a sense of community with those who call it home. This is a book that’s both very personal, yet also universal. It encompasses myth, psychology, philosophy, literature and straightforward travel writing. Quickly read, it demands to be looked at again and again. It will stay in my mind for a long time.

So there we have it. My sea-related chain. Our next book is Stefan Zweig‘s The Post-Office Girl. Will my next chain be post office related? Now that would be a challenge.

Six Degrees of Separation: from The Correspondent to A Little Trickerie

Kate: Books are my Favourite and Best

I have had a lot of trouble with this chain: It’s stumbled together, rather than gracefully evolved. And it begins with a book I haven’t read. The Correspondent, by Virginia Evans is a debut epistolary novel exploring the life of Sybil Van Antwerp, a prickly, 73-year-old retired Maryland lawyer navigating deteriorating eyesight and past grief.

I decided to go with a woman who writes – not letters, but a notebook. Forbidden Notebook, by Alba de Céspedes and translated by Ann Goldstein, is set in 1950s Rome, about Valeria Cossati, a 43-year-old wife and mother who starts a secret diary. Her dreams are humble: to have space in the house for herself, and just a little time. Writing in this forbidden journal causes her to question her restricted domestic life, her husband’s patriarchal authority, and her own identity, leading to a profound personal awakening.

What about a woman – and a man too, in fact – who hadn’t even known they were dissatisfied, until …. ? This story is told in André Aciman’s Room on the Sea. Paul and Catherine are two married professionals in their 60s who meet during a sultry New York City jury selection. Over a week, their initial connection deepens into a secret, intense, and philosophical romance, exploring themes of yearning, regret, and the temptation to act on missed opportunities. This novella charmed me as much as this man, this woman charmed each other. Their easy teasing relationship, their way with words, their openness with one another had me rooting for them.

Maybe Paul and Catherine have an affair. Maybe they don’t. My next book, Phil Harrison’s The First Day begins with an affair and its consequences. It’s a book of two halves. exploring a destructive affair between Samuel Orr, a married Belfast preacher with a twelve year old son Philip, and Anna, a young Beckett scholar. Anna falls pregnant, they keep the baby … and everything falls apart. Fast forward thirty years to New York where that baby, Sam is now living. He’s our narrator – actually it turns out he always has been. Why is he there? Why is he choosing to stay under the radar? Eventually, horrified, we find out. This is a very readable book about faith, about power-imbalance, about desire, about long shadows cast by single events.

In The First Day, Samuel Orr is never referred to as anything but ‘Orr’. In James Meek’s Your Life Without Me, the main protagonist, an English teacher, is only ever known as Mr. Burnham. The story centres on him as he navigates the death of his wife Ada, and his strained relationship with his truculent teenage daughter Leila. And there’s Raf, ex-pupil with whom he maintains close contact. Is Mr. Burnham going to be implicated when Raf is discovered in a major act of terrorim? Despite the perhaps over-neat ending, this is a well-delivered book about four flawed and compromised people, building into a compassionate and involving story.

Leila is an awkward and motherless teenager. Let’s go back twelve centuries and find another: Agnes, in Emily Maguire’s Rapture. Brought up and educated by her father in a world of men, Agnes renders herself unsuitable marriage material in 9th century Mainz. When her father unexpectedly dies, she disguises herself as a man and enters a monastery. The book catalogues her life as a respected scholar and scribe in an austere Benedictine monastery, and her subsequent adventures which see her travel to Athens, to Rome, where her scholarship, her piety ensure she’s always noticed by those who matter. She lives always with the fear of being found out for who she is, with the discomfort of her tightly bound breasts, with her tussles with herself over her austere faith. We come to know Agnes/John as a child, a scholar, a woman, a lover, a teacher… and finally a pope. An absorbing, well researched, imagined and audacious story, transporting me to the reality of religious life in 9th century Europe.

We’ll stay in the past, but in early Tudor England, and meet a young vagrant, Tibb Ingleby, in Rosanna Pike’s A Little Trickerie. Her mother dies, and Tibb has to make her way alone in a world where vagrancy is a crime. Meeting a young lad, Ivo, makes a big difference and the two team up. One day he disappears, and her next adventure sees her falling in with a band of strolling players. And on the story goes, vivaciously told by uneducated Tibb, who nevertheless has a way with words. Who knew that being naked was ‘wearing a no-clothes outfit’? Through her we meet the often horrifying prejudices and superstitions of early 16th century England, The last section of the book is inspired by the story of a real woman known as the Holy Maid of Leominster who, like Tibb herself, engaged in fraud and ‘trickeries’ . Fraudster or not, Tibb is an engaging character, doing what she can to get through life as best she can, never hurting those she holds dear. The ending disappointed, but till then, I found it an involving story.

So there we have it. Six books, six or more characters with tales to tell about their ordinary – or not so ordinary – lives. Next month, we’re to begin with Charlotte McConaghy‘s Wild Dark Shore, set on a remote small island housing the world’s largest seed bank. That should give scope for next month’s Six Degrees to scatter in many different directions. If you don’t already … why not join in?

Six Degrees of Separation: From Wuthering Heights to Back in the Day

I gave Six Degrees a miss for several months, feeling as though I’d lost my way with it. But it’s rather addictive – so I’m back.

Kate: Books are my Favourite and Best

This month starts with Emily Brontë‘s Wuthering Heights. Whether or not you’ve read the book, or seen any of the film adaptations, you’ll know that anti-hero Heathcliff is a vengeful misfit, and a very angry man.

So I’m beginning my chain with another: Emily’ s own brother, who is the subject of Robert Edric‘s book Sanctuary. Bramwell is the family’s black sheep, fighting his failures, his addictions, his inability to find a way to make something of his life. He is in fact the ‘author’ of this book. He paints a sorry picture of his stumbling path, in the final year of his young life, towards illness, addiction and death. Edric has carefully constructed this book in a series of vignettes that barely constitute a narrative, but which leave us feeling bewildered sympathy for an intelligent young man who has utterly lost his way. A beautifully imagined reconstruction of a life ill-lived.

My next choice features not just one, but two self-destructive men. The Two Roberts, by Damian Barr, re-imagines the lives of two now little remembered Scottish painters from the early years of the twentieth century, Bobby McBride and Robert Colquhoun. These working class Glasgow lads, homosexuals at a time when it was still illegal, at first made a success of both their lives and careers with their prodigious talents. They worked hard, but played harder, and their wild parties were awash with hard liquor. And this eventually became a problem. Their self-destruction tumbles them further and further into poverty. An immersive, sympathetic imagining of two lives. The book illustrates well the blossoming of two talents, and their chaotic collapse, as well as showing what it meant to be queer in a society which both reviled and punished homosexuality.

What about a book – a true story – about two men who might also appear to most as failures in life? Under the Hornbeams, by Emma Tarlo . She was a University professor (anthropology) living near Regents Park, and was introduced early in lockdown to two very unusual men. They lived, completely without shelter other than that offered by the hornbeam trees, in a little unfrequented spot in Regents Park, and had done so for some years. They didn’t identify as homeless, and considered their lifestyle a positive choice. Tarlo is intrigued, and their relationship deepens into friendship. Not that of a middle class saviour bringing food and practical gifts to the men, but one of give and take. She appreciates the increasingly deep conversations that take place, grows to love and appreciate the natural world in a different way, and to review with increasing dissatisfaction her own pressured life as a university head of department. Tarlo affords the men dignity as she writes about them, and recognises the dangers and discomfort of many aspects of their chosen life style: not least that the still-in-force 1824 Vagrancy Act still criminalises homelessness.

Here’s another unusual life, as recounted in This, My Second Life, by Patrick Charnley. This is a work of fiction. Up to a point. The story that narrator Jago Trevarno tells is his to tell, but it’s entirely informed by Patrick Charnley’s own life experience of his cardiac arrest and brain injury. This transformation from Jago’s high-achieving life lived to a large extent in the fast lane to a much simpler existence lived off-grid on his uncle’s farm is as much the subject of this story as the tale of how he and his uncle contend with a thoroughly villainous neighbour, Bill Sligo who – unaccountably – wants to buy part of Jacob’s farm. Jago’s new life – simple, measured, suits his new circumstances. Sligo’s nefarious plans force Jago into risky courses of action which could all too easily go wrong. Much of the delight of this book is in its spare. almost elegiac writing, bringing Joseph’s farm and Jago’s new circumstances gently yet vividly to life. I hope Charney can find a voice beyond this one, so effective at its sympathetic depiction of his hero’s brain injury. His writing deserves to be more than a one-book-wonder.

This month seems to be about the outcast. So let’s have an entirely different one, in RJ Palacio’s YA novel Wonder. This is a book about an ordinary 10 year old boy, who isn’t ordinary at all, because in his short life he’s undergone dozens of operations on his face. So abnormal, even frightening is his appearance that it’s impossible to pass him by without staring, or very obviously dropping your gaze. He’s much loved by his family – his parents and older sister Via – but he’s been home-educated till now. But this is the moment to send him out into the ‘normal’ world of school. This is the story of his first year there: a story of bullying, meanness, cruelty even, but also kindness and acceptance. Told by August himself – the boy who lives with his deformity – it’s a moving, thought-provoking roller-coaster of a story showing how even those who love him most can be tested in their acceptance of him, and even those who reject him can – eventually – learn that he is so much more than an exceptionally ugly face.

This chain has been entirely about men and boys living out their lives – with greater or lesser degrees of success – outside the mainstream. So we’ll finish in the same way,with Back in the Day: Oliver Lovrenski (Translated with astonishing bravura by Nichola Smalley) The four protagonists have come with their families as immigrants from various parts of the world – narrator Ivor is from Croatia and Marco from Somalia for instance. Clever and ambitious, they lose interest in school when they overtake their classmates and remain unchallenged. Dreams of becoming lawyers are exchanged for knives and protecting other family members. Drug dealing leads to institutional care for one, and a slippery slope to violence, machetes and guns. Will eventual grief and remorse result in a turning point? This is a tough, intense yet rewarding read by a young Norwegian of Croatian heritage who wrote it when he was just 19. I hope there’s more from him, and from his talented translator.

However did I come to make this chain exclusively male (albeit with two female authors)? It’s International Women’s Day tomorrow after all. Ah well, next month’s book is by a woman, Virginia Evans: her epistolary novel The Correspondent. Next month, why not join in Six Degrees … if you don’t already?

Six Degrees of Separation: from Ghost Cities to My Father’s House

Kate: Books are my Favourite and Best

I haven’t read Siang Lu’s Ghost Cities. But I’ve read several reviews, and it seems that this novel is inspired by the vacant, uninhabited megacities of China, and follows multiple narratives many years apart. In the present day, Xiang is fired from his job as a translator at Sydney’s Chinese Consulate after it’s discovered he’s been using Google Translate. This alternates with stories from the past of a dictatorial Imperial Emperor and his escapades.

I immediately thought of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, which I read far too long ago to comment on seriously now. But it begins: ’Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his.’ And here begins Italo Calvino’s compilation of fragmentary urban images.

This Italian author made me think of one travel writer’s account of one part of Italy. Jan Morris’ Trieste and The Meaning of Nowhere. I felt a little ambivalent about this book. I wanted to like it more than I actually did. It’s a meditation on, and an exploration of Trieste, a city history has left behind, whose glory days are over, which is top of nobody’s tourist agenda, and which Jan Morris entertains strong feelings for. She discusses its history, its streets, its day-to-day life in a loving, melancholic way, and relates it to her own experience of being outside the mainstream. It’s a book which I’m glad to have read about a part of Italy I don’t know, but which I was happy enough to finish and set aside.

Vigàta in Sicily is another town which time has perhaps forgotten. It’s also imaginary, and the setting for a series of murder mysteries by Andrea Camilleri. Despite the fact that as a detective series, which therefore concerns murder and other crimes, the Inspector Montalbano books are ones I turn to when I need a bit of relief from weightier tomes. I love to meet the people Camilleri describes. I like to accompany Montalbano as he seeks out delicious meals at home or at neighbourhood restaurants. And I like to observe his relationships with his colleagues. The Voice of the Violin doesn’t disappoint. It’s about a murder which might have taken a very long time to have come to light if the police car in which Montalbano was a passenger hadn’t careered into a car parked outside a villa…. And in due course, Montalbano’s curiosity is piqued … He finds a body, of course. And up to five people might be responsible for the gruesome murder. But who? And you’ll need to read this book to find out why the title it’s been given is so apposite.

From one Italian detective to another. I love Commissario Brunetti, and I love the picture of Venice that Donna Leon, his creator, always conjures up. The alleys between ancient buildings, those palazzi themselves, the little bars Brunetti frequents…. and so on and so on. So even before I get involved in the plot, I’m absorbed by the ambience she creates. Death at la Fenice is, like all Leon’s tales, a good story. This one features the conductor who’s murdered during the interval at a performance at la Fenice. Whodunnit? His wife? That soprano? Her lover? As ever, the result of Brunetti’s investigation is an unexpected one, and convincing. Read it.

We’re staying in Italy for the rest of this chain. But we’ll leap back several centuries in Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait.. Lucrezia, third daughter Cosimo de’ Medici, finds herself betrothed, then married to Alfonso, heir to the Duke of Ferrara when her older sister, his original choice, dies. The story flits between her early life in Florence and her early married life. Underneath, throughout her marriage, her conviction that she will be killed by her apparently loving husband bubbles away. She’s a Duchess now, her father-in-law having died. She’s only 15, more than 10 years younger than her husband. Although she’s been brought up privileged, her new status brings with it loneliness and challenges. Virtually her only constant friend is her maid.

This book links with the two previous ones by being rich in quotidian detail. O’Farrell paints the pictures of her privileged life in such a way that we can hear, see and smell the scenes that surround her: her father’s exotic menagerie; her husband’s castrati singers; the sumptuous clothing; the simple bowls of fruit which she examines with her painterly eye – she is a talented artist. This rich attention to detail brings an already absorbing story fully to life.

Still Italy, still history, but much more recent in the first volume of Joseph O’Connor‘s Escape Line Trilogy. My Father’s House is an immersive story, taking as its starting point the fact that while Rome was under German occupation in 1942, there was an Irish priest, Hugh O’Flaherty, based at the Vatican who was involved in running an escape line for Jews, escaped POWs and resistance fighters during WWII.

The plan is to evacuate scores of refugees and resistance fighters, all separately hidden, out of Rome on Christmas Eve, when perhaps guard is lowered. Plans take place at the rehearsals of a specially convened Chamber Choir: singing drowns out the mutter of whispered instructions to each singer in turn. Each player in the plot has a role, No one knows what any other individual is required to do. Gestapo leader Paul Hauptmann has his suspicions that a plan is afoot, and O’Flaherty is in his sights.

This is a work of fiction, even though heavily indebted to known facts. It’s told in a series of distinct voices, all characters in the book. Each voice is distinctive, authentic, even funny: Irish, English, Italian, aristocrats and shopkeepers. An often thrilling, always thought-provoking and absorbing story.

My chain seems to owe everything to Italy, and little to the starter book. I won’t do any better next month. I’m unliklely to participate, as we’ll be away, and I don’t like the idea of not responding promptly to comments. But the starter book will be Dominic Amerena’s novel about authors and publishing, I Want Everything. I think I’ll try to read it anyway.

With thanks to the photographers from Pixabay whose photos I have used: LeoLeo (cities); VBosica (Miremare, Trieste); Gianni Cio 10 (Sicily); Filip Filopovic (Ferrara); Davide Cattini (Rome).  And from Unsplash, Giusi Borrasi (La Fenice, Venice)

Six Degrees of Separation: The Safekeep to Pachinko

Kate: Books are my Favourite and Best

Thank you so much for putting Yael van der Wouden‘s The Safekeep on my reading list Kate. It’s a book which delivered so much, and also invites any number of ways the Six Degrees contributor could go.

I settled for looking at those parts of WWII little known about here, as far as the German perspective goes. and begin with We Germans, by Alexander Storritt. ‘What did you do in the war?’ a young British man asks his German Grandad. And is told, in the form of a long letter found after his death. In 1944, Meissner, a German artillery soldier, had been fighting with his unit in Russia, in Ukraine. But in Poland, he and a few others somehow got separated when detailed to look for a rumoured food depot. They see Polish villagers hung by unidentified men from a single tree ‘in bunches, like swollen plums.’ They witness rape and crucifixion. They steal a tank and use it against the Russians. They squabble bitterly with each other. They kill enemy soldiers without compunction. This is a well-drawn book, a deft exploration of the moral contradictions inherent in saving one’s own life at the cost of the lives of others. Though fiction, it’s clearly deeply rooted in the reality of the helpless, pointess horror of the last period of the war for those often starving people, both army and hapless civilians who found themselves marooned on the Eastern Front.

A book in a similar vein is Hubert Mingarelli‘s A Meal in Winter (translated by Sam Taylor). An account of three German soldiers whose task on a bitterly cold winter day is to hunt down Jews in hiding and bring them back to the Polish concentration camp where they are based, for an inevitable end. This unenviable task is better than the alternative: staying in camp to shoot those who were found the previous day. They talk – about the teenage son of one of them – and they find just one Jew. Is he their enemy, deserving his fate, or is he just like them, a young man doing his best to survive? What if they return to camp with nobody to show for their day’s hunting? As the men retreat to an abandoned cottage to prepare a meagre meal, their hatred and fear jostle with their well-submerged more humane feelings to provide the rest of the drama for this short, thought provoking book.

This reminds me of a book about the seige of Leningrad, which I read many years ago, but which made a lasting impression on me: Helen Dunmore‘s The Siege. The novel revolves around five interwoven lives during the war when Leningrad was completely surrounded by the Germans. Winter came and there was no food or coal, it was a brutal winter and one half of the population of the city perished. What energy the citizens had was devoted to the constant struggle to stay alive. Some of the strategies they employed will stay with me forever. Soaking leather bookmarks to get some nourishment from the resulting ‘stock’, for instance.

Let’s leave war behind, but looks at another struggle for survival in Cormac McCarthy‘s The Road: another book I read a long time ago. The tale of a father and son trudging through post-Apocalypse America. This is a land where nothing grows, no small animals are there for the hunting: where communities and dwellings are deserted and long-since looted for anything that might sustain life a few more days: where other humans might prove peaceable, but might instead be evil and dangerous. This book is bleakly, sparely written. Conversations between father and son are clipped, necessary. No speech marks. Sometimes little punctuation. Every ounce of energy is needed for the business of staying alive. This book, in which nobody lives happily-ever-after has stayed with me.

Oh dear, back to war, but staying with relationships within a family. V.V. Ganeshananthan‘s Brotherless Night. This book plunged me right into a war that had previously been an ongoing news item from somewhere very far away. The ethnic conflict in 1980s Sri Lanka between the Sinhalese dominant state and several separatist Tamil separatist groups is brought to life by the Tamil narator, Sashi. She’s 16 when we meet her, and an aspiring doctor. She has 4 brothers, 3 older, one younger. We follow the family’s fortunes as an ethic-inspired war breaks out, and daily life becomes more difficult, disrupting her education and resulting in her older brothers and their friend K joining the fray at the expense of their own education. Loyalty to a movement rather than family is alien to their parents. Tensions arise. Tragedy strikes. Normally conforming Sashi is moved to become a medic at a field hospital for the Tigers, because what is more important than relieving suffering, saving lives, whoever needs that help? As the war becomes ever more destructive, her personal conflicts and the family’s day to day arrangements become ever more complex. Years go by as the story unfolds. This story is impeccably and compassionately researched. It is urgent, intimate, written with striking imagery and immediacy. A distant conflict, several decades old is brought right into our homes and becomes alive once more.

Another book I read ages ago is Min Jin Lee‘s Pachinko. This too is about not civil war, but about two nations – Korea and Japan -who historically have a less than happy relationship, and how this conflict plays out in the life of a single family, throughout the twentieth century. Some stayed in Korea (South Korea in due course), and others tried for a new life in Japan. None found it easy. This is a book about resilience and emotional conflict passing down through the generations. It’s about well-drawn characters making their way in the world, sometimes with great success, but rarely able to escape from the shadow of their past. It’s a real page turner, from which I learnt much about this period of Korea’s history. Highly recommended.

I seem to have wandered rather far from the intimately domestic scale of The Safekeep, and spent a lot of time dwelling on war. I wonder what my next chain will make of August’s book: Ghost Cities, by Siang Lu?

Six Degrees of Separation: From All Fours to Grow Where They Fall

Kate: : Books are my Favourite and Best

All Fours,by Miranda July and this month’s starter book, is narrated by a 46 year old woman, a wife, a mother, a bisexual, a mixed media artist. I haven’t read it yet, but I think it’s on my TBR list.

Well, I picked up on the word ‘artist’. Not a woman, not a family man, but a 16th century Florentine painter, probably homosexual: Jacopo Pontormo. He’s the sort-of-star of Laurent Binet’s Perspectives. This story relies on a clever conceit: that the author (who unlike the very much alive actual author) finds, towards the end of the 19th century an interesting packet of letters in a curio shop. His interest piqued, he buys, then translates them. And presents them to us here, in this book. We’re in 16th century Florence. The cast list can be found in any history book dealing with that period of political and art history. Cosimo de’ Medici; Catherine de’ Medici; Giorgio Vasari; Michelangelo; Bronzino; Cellini; Pontormo: the list goes on, but this story is entirely untrue. It revolves around the fact that Pontormo, painting a now-lost group of frescoes, is discovered dead at his work. Suicide? Or murder? And if the latter, who’s the murderer? A series of letters between groups of the characters involved, not all of whom know or have dealings with one another, picks over the evidence, relying on actual investigation – sometimes – but more often hunches, gossip and personal ‘intuition’. There are subplots: There’s for instance, Maria de’ Medici, Cosimo’s 17 year old daughter, who’s to be married against her will for reasons of political alliance. When guards search Pontormo’s quarters, they find an obscene painting of Venus and Cupid—with the face of Venus replaced by that of Maria. What a scandal! This is a cleverly accomplished story, and wonderfully translated. It’s a tight, fast paced whodunnit brimming with subplots, from an author who clearly knows his stuff about the history of the period.

Let’s pass to another artist, Vermeer, in Douglas Bruton’s Woman in Blue. Douglas Bruton must have been fascinated by Vermeer’s Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, in the Rijksmuseum: he knows it so well. He gives this interest – or in this case near-obsession – to one of the two narrators of this book who take alternate chapters throughout. An unnamed man visits this picture every day, for several hours, knows it intimately, interrogates it for meaning. This does not go unnoticed by gallery staff, or by his wife, who does not know where it is her husband disappears to. The other narrator is the young woman in the picture, who describes how it is she comes to sit for this particular portrait, and her own feelings. She is sensitive to the thoughts and feelings of the man who is transfixed by her portrait, amused that he is as in thrall to her as Vermeer himself, though she’s unaware of this man’s musings on previous romantic entanglements and indeed his feelings about his wife.This book explores the boundaries between reality and illusion in art, inspecting the portrait and the two protagonists intimately. It’s a captivating novella, with a surprise ending, and beautifully expressed throughout.

All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley is a book I have only just started. Bringley was for a period of his life a museum attendant Here’s what Google Books has to say about his work: ‘A moving, revelatory portrait of one of the world’s great museums and its treasures by a writer who spent a decade as a museum guard. Millions of people climb the grand marble staircase to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art every year. But only a select few have unrestricted access to every nook and cranny….’

Museum Attendant? It’s not such a big leap from there to librarian perhaps. The Librarianist by Patrick de Witt. At first I was prepared to be charmed by this whimsical account of the life and times of Bob Comet. A misfit at school, he became a librarian – of course he did. Then he continued – quite contentedly – his largely friendless existence, living in the house where he’d been born, now his alone since his mother’s death. He meets a young woman – also a social misfit, completely under her father’s thumb – at the library. Reader, he marries her. At about this time, he also comes across the man who becomes his only male friend, and – no, spoiler alert. We are introduced to Bob at the point when he’s long been separated from his wife. And, so far so good. But we plunge back into his younger life and the book loses its way, especially when we spend far too long in the time when he ran away from home as an eleven year old. It’s not hugely relevant to the story or to the man he became. A bit of a curate’s egg of a book then. Good in parts. But I’m not encouraged to read more work by de Witt.

Another book about a misfit. Jenny Mustard’s What a Time to be Alive. Perhaps I’m too old. This book comes with glowing endorsements on the cover from a number of well-regarded authors. But I just can’t share their enthusiasm. Sickan, a 21 year old student at Stockholm University, comes from a small town where she was often lonely, and seemed a bit odd. She’s determined to reinvent herself but is socially awkward. She seems to make progress: finding a flatmate, beginning to join in normal student life, albeit always feeling something of an imposter. She even finds a boyfriend, who’s charming. It’s a story about loneliness, and the well-remembered awkwardness of becoming an adult and wondering which bits of your true self you wish to hang on to. But although it’s well written, I never really engaged with it. My loss, probably.

My last book is about a man who isn’t a misfit, because he tries so very hard not to be, in Michael Donkor’s Grow Where They Fall. Here is the story of Kwarme, son of Ghanaian immigrants and living in London. The book is told in alternating chapters: his 10 year old self who attends a multicultural primary school, and his 30 year old self, who teaches in a multicultural high school. Black and queer, Kwame is also a Durham graduate. His flat mate, an upper class white man writing about wine, is very different from his traditionally-minded working class Ghanaian family. Kwame fits in, though never without a conscious struggle. It’s what he always has to do. Conforming is something he’s used to, though his homosexuality is a real challenge to someone of his cultural background. He’s a popular teacher, well liked, but his uncertainties and feelings of being unmoored and a little out of his depth persist. Towards the end of the book, one event, small in itself, assumes huge proportions in his mind and forces him to finally make some big decisions. This is a novel about Kwame finding his place. Finding himself, in fact, and having the courage to live his life. It’s told in the context – often amusingly recounted – of a small boy’s day-to-day struggle to please, and an adult’s wish also to be liked and respected.

I seem to have done quite a bit of travelling this month’s choices (and in real life, as it happens). Next month, Kate starts with the 2025 Stella Prize winner, Michelle de Kretser’s work of autofiction, Theory & Practice. Where will that lead us all, I wonder?

Image Credits

Jacopo Pontormo:  Visitation of Carmagnano, Church of San Francesco e Michele (Wikimedia Commons)

Delft: Who's Denilo? (Unsplash)

Metropolitan Museum of Art: Yilei (Jerry) Bao (Unsplash)

Library image (Actually Barter Books in Alnwick): my own image.

Snow scene: my own image.

Ghanaian man: Kojo Kwarteng (Unsplash)

Six Degrees of Separation: from Rapture to The Island Of Sea Women

Kate: Books are my Favourite and Best

Set within a religious community in 9th century Germany, Emily Maguire‘s Rapture, which I have yet to read, reimagines the life of the first and only female pope.

It’s not too much of a stretch to travel to 7th century Ireland in Emma Donoghue’s Haven. Holy man Artt, recently returned from his travels, fetches up at a monastery with a plan to set forth with two of the monks there to set up a tiny community on a totally uninhabited island, to live prayerfully in total isolation. Imperfectly equipped, they soon embark on their journey into the unknown: and Artt insists on choosing not one of the nearby islands, but a distant one that is rocky, bleak, inhospitable. The tough character of this island, with its panoply of resident birds is brought vividly to life, as are monks Cormac and Trian. Artt remains as distant to us in many ways as he is to the two monks. This is a story that cannot end well, as a bad situation becomes worse. But it vividly brings to life the increasingly unbearable conditions made more difficult by a completely unapproachable and inflexible man-in-charge. It’s a quietly engrossing story.

A different remote island, at a different time – the 19th century. Carys Davies’ Clear is an engrossing book about a vanished way of life. One which disappeared during the devastating Highland Clearances in Scotland during the 19th century. A man Ivar, the sole inhabitant – with his few animals – of a remote island, is alive to the natural rhythms of the island – the many seasons, winds, mists, rains and tides that govern it. And when John Ferguson appears to evict him, but instead falls into a concussed coma from which Ivar nurses him back to health, he too falls under the island’s spell, and haltingly Ferguson begins to learn the vocabulary, then the language itself which Ivar speaks. The book celebrates that language and the fragility of life in such a spot, as well as asking questions about the future of Ivar, John, and John’s wife Mary, all of whom are in different ways implicated in the consequences of the Highland Clearance.

Yet another remote island – off Norway this time – present day Norway. Author and farmer James Rebanks was going through a tough time mentally. He needed to get away, and got the chance to stay in a remote and tiny island just below the Arctic Circle, where a woman was continuing the tradition, practised since Viking times of encouraging eider ducks to breed there, so that their valuable down could be harvested for warm clothing and quilts. This book is an account of the island’s astonishingly rich (but always diminishing) range of birdlife; its weather and relationship with the often unforgiving sea. Of how the woman and her friend, and that year Rebanks too, persuaded eider ducks back by building nests for them – yes, really! The protective down could be harvested from the nests when finally deserted, then cleaned and prepared for sale. It’s an immersive tale of a life that’s simple, often monotonous, always hard and often bleak, but with simple satisfaction too. The tale is told in The Place of Tides.

Let’s stay by the sea but lighten the mood, and read Jess Kidd’s Murder at Gull’s Nest. It’s Cosy Crime, and I don’t like this genre at all. But Jess came to speak recently at our local independent bookshop. She was a hit. She spoke wittily and enthusiastically about her career as a writer, and about this book, which is only the first of a planned series, following its heroine, a woman of middle years, plain and practical, Nora Breen. Nora links back to where we started from, because she was until recently a nun. But when her fellow nun and friend Frieda leaves the order, and then goes missing, Nora chooses this event as her reason to abandon her vocation behind and search for Frieda. She begins her search in a seaside town in the south, Gore-on-Sea(!) at a pretty dreadful boarding house (this is the 1950s) called The Gulls Nest, where Frieda herself had stayed till she disappeared, a victim in Nora’s opinion, but not that of the police, of Murder Most Foul. At first I was rooting for Nora, and enjoyed getting to know the half dozen or so other varied characters who populated this book . But improbable incident follows improbable incident. The book’s well written, but it isn’t enough to keep me invested in the events it described.

It’s too late now. I’ll have to stay with the sea for the whole chain, and this time, with gulls too. But let’s change the mood, and go with non fiction. Adam Nicolson’s The Seabird’s Cry. I unreservedly loved this book. Nicolson has long been fascinated by seabirds – not just gulls – and explains how these birds differ so much in habit and lifestyle from the garden birds with whom many of us are more familiar. Then he takes ten different species to examine in turn. He refers to his personal observations, to scientific research, to history and to literature to build a rounded and fascinating portrait of each species he’s chosen. My husband got used to having a daily bulletin of ‘today’s most fascinating seabird facts’ at breakfast each morning. Beautifully written, meticulously researched. readable and involving, this was a book I was sorry to finish.
.

I’ll end in entirely another part of the world – South Korea, and take you to the island of Jeju, in Lisa See’s The Island of Sea Women. I had an immediate interest in this book, having travelled in South Korea – though we didn’t visit Jeju – and having already learnt to be fascinated by the lives of the haenyeo diving women. These are divers who harvest seafood (sea cucumber, urchins, abalone, octopus) all year round from the sea floor; they can stay underwater for sustained periods of time without breathing apparatus. This book combines a strong story following the story of two women Young-Sook and her mother, whose lives develop through their membership of the haenyeo culture, as they live through a twentieth century defined in Korea by occupation, internal conflict, deprivation and rapid change. Learning more about this history was in itself illuminating and interesting. It was a backdrop to a story of friendships, broken relationships and family struggle which drew me in to the last page. I was sorry to finish this book too.

It’s not clear to me how I got from a religious life in long-ago Germany to six books involving the sea. But Six Degrees takes us all to unexpected places. Where will next month’s starter book, All Fours, by Miranda July take us?

Six Degrees of Separation: from Knife to The Lightless Sky

Kate: Books are my Favourite and Best

This month’s starter book is Salman Rushdie‘s Knife, a memoir written in the aftermath of the attempt on his life in 2022, and as a result of which he lost his sight in one eye. I haven’t yet read it. But I have read another memoir which deals with the shadow of death.

This is Amy Bloom‘s In Love – a Memoir of Love and Loss. Bloom has written a searing account of the last year of her husband Brian Ameche’s life. This became a roller coaster year: except it wasn’t, because as she points out, roller coaster rides are thrilling, fun, and fast and furious. Ameche’s last year of life was none of those things. It was the year in which he received the diagnosis he – and she, and those close to him – feared: dementia. Within a week, he had decided, and never wavered, that he would choose to die rather than totter onwards through some kind of half-life . The book reports, dodging back and forth through time, their exploration of how he might die, and arriving at the decision that Dignitas offered him – well – dignity in dying. Against the odds, this book is often wry, funny, darkly humorous, sarcastic and savvy. The pages turn very easily. It’s a moving, very thought-provoking memoir.

Now to a book featuring a character who has – not dementia, but its close cousin – Alzheimer’s disease. The Wilderness, by Samantha Harvey. This is the story of Jake, 65 year old Jake, whose wife has died, whose son is in prison, whose daughter ….. well, Jake has Alzheimers, and we tumble with him into a tangle of reminiscence, misleading timelines and confusion, as like him, we try to make sense of his new helplessness and puzzlement about the fates of those he holds dear. It’s a wonderfully imagined book, which gave me real insight (and fears) into an existence entirely dominated by unreliable memories, whether of mothers, lovers, or where to store the coffee cups. Here is a man who was once an architect with vision, now reduced to dependency and frustration. Beautifully written, it had me gripped till the last page.

Here’s a book about a wilderness of the natural world kind, by Jim Crace. Quarantine. I read it years ago, long before I kept reviews of every book I read. So I’ll quote Carys Davies, writing in the Guardian. ‘Crace’s masterful novel takes us into the parched and hostile landscape of the Judean desert, where we meet Christ himself – naked and fasting – and a small band of other “quarantiners”, all with their different reasons for being there. A spellbinding tale that is by turns funny and grotesque, lyrical and philosophical; a fascinating study of hope and fear, belief and imagination’.

Delia Owens‘ Where the Crawdads Sing is set in a kind of wilderness too – a wild untamed place at the edge of the sea. Is it the perfect novel? Perhaps. It’s got something for everyone: a coming-of-age story about a young friendless girl, Kya, abandoned by her family and siblings, who has to make her own way in the world as ‘Marsh girl’, living in a shack on the shoreline. It’s a mystery story. Though this element unfolds slowly, once it developed, it had me gripped until the very last page. It’s beautifully evocative nature writing too, informed yet lyrical, capturing the soul of a North Carolina marshland shoreline rich in bird and other wildlife. This is a book about Kya herself, and about the community where she grew up in the 1950s and 60s, with its racial divisions.

There’s a wilderness of yet a different kind in Leo Vardiashvili‘s Hard by a Great Forest. Saba, his older brother and his father came to England – originally as asylum seekers from Georgia following the collapse of the Soviet Union. They’re dogged by guilt that they never managed to bring Saba’s mother over before she died. Some twelve years after their arrival, the father returns to Georgia, to Tbilisi, then disappears. The same happens with Saba’s brother when he goes to look for him. So Saba goes too. What follows is an adventure that is in turn picaresque and Kafkaesque. His trail is guided by the dead relatives and friends who speak to him from the grave, with their grievances and advice. He is by turns optimistic, melancholy, cynical, and with a great line in absurdist wit. In his quest he’s assisted by the first taxi driver to give him a lift, Nodar, who offers him bed and board, and then all of his time. Nodar has an agenda of his own, which first leads to the story’s first crisis. Their adventures have a nightmare quixotishness which are exhausting to read, and full of menace. Leitmotifs running through the book are the incidents involving the wild animals who have escaped from Tbilisi zoo and roam town and countryside randomly, and sometimes menacingly. This is a galloping adventure story that is at times difficult to read, because rooted in an uncomfortable reality.

Vardiashvili was himself once an asylum seeker, arriving here when he was twelve. So was Gulwari Passarlay, who wrote The Lightless Sky. This memoir is the story of an ordinary twelve year old Afghan boy, forced to become extraordinary when his family pays traffickers to get him out of the country and into Europe. It’s the story of a child forced within weeks to become an adult confronted with situations nobody should ever have to deal with. It should be required reading for anyone who’s ever complained that such people should get back where they came from, that they are here for the benefits they can extract from their host country. This is a powerful, harrowing book by a boy – now a man – who has survived, and is now making the most of every opportunity that he can to change the situation of refugees and our perception of them.

I’m not going to attempt to link this last book back to the beginning of my chain: except perhaps that both are memoirs. Instead, I’ll tell you that next month’s starter book will be Rapture by Emily Maguire. And I have this evening finished the first book which I’ll link with it.

With the exception of my first image, which comes from the Times’ article about Ameche’s decision to end his life, the rest come from photographers contributing to Pexels: Abdul Rahman Abu Baker; Christyn Reyes; A G Rosales; Roman Odintsov; Tolga Karakaya. Thank you to each one of them.

Six Degrees of Separation: From Dangerous Liaisons to Cloistered

Kate: Books are my Favourite and Best

I haven’t yet read this month’s choice: Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ Dangerous Liaisons. I ordered it from the library and have only just collected it.

So … I’ll go with the fact that it’s a novel written in epistolary form, and choose another written in this way: Ann Youngson’s Meet Me at the Museum. A book of considerable charm. An English 60 year old farmer’s wife writes a letter to a museum curator & professor in Denmark about Tollund Man, a perfectly preserved man from about 300 BCE who is exhibited there. A correspondence begins. Initially formal, the letters become more intimate. This busy outdoorsy farmer’s wife with her chintzy house couldn’t be more different from austere Scandinavian Anders. But both are lonely and have gaping holes in their lives. With every letter they disclose more of their joys, disappointments and difficulties and draw inexorably closer. At the end is a revelation. What effect will this have on them, on their burgeoning relationship? We can only speculate. A touching and intimate book.

Archaeology and paleontology are not the same, but perhaps it’s not too big a leap to go to southern England in the early 19th century for Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures.This book is a fictional account, almost certainly not too far from the truth, about the geological work of middle-class-but-in-reduced-circumstances Elizabeth Philpott, and definitely working class Mary Anning. Both live in one of the fossil capitals of England, Lyme Regis. Both spend hours on the beach fossil hunting – Elizabeth for her own interest and as a pastime, Mary for an income, selling them. It’s inevitable that they should meet, less inevitable that Elizabeth should become Mary’s friend and champion, encouraging her to learn to read and write.This is their story. And it takes a very long time for it to end well for Mary. An enjoyable, and – yes – an informative read, if not Tracy Chevalier at her best.

Reading this may whet your appetite for a spot of non-fiction: Helen Gordon’s Notes from Deep Time: an engaging and thought-provoking account of geological time. As a non-scientist, I often find such accounts dry or inaccessible, but this is a highly readable book attempting with some success to engage our brains in comprehending the vastness of time, and the difference between the various eons that constitute the time that the earth has been in being. Who knew for instance that triceratops and tyrannosaurus rex not only didn’t appear on earth at the same time, but in fact were separated from each other by an infinitely longer time span than humankind from tyrannosaurus? From discussions about the physical appearance of the earth in previous periods, to ongoing research about dinosaurs (what colour were they?) to urban geology, and laying up problems for the future, this is a wide ranging book to which I shall return.

I’m making a great job of mixing archaeology and paleontology, because my next book, The Crossing Places involves a professional archaeologist, Dr. Ruth Galloway, in the first of the popular series about her by Ellie Griffiths. An involving story, with well-developed, believable characters and a sense of place: the flat Norfolk landscape is well described. I bought into the plot, with Ruth Galloway, young academic archeologist brought into a police investigation to uncover a mystery about a disappeared child whose bones might, just might, be buried on her ‘patch’. The series is some 15 books long and I’ve by no means read them all. But they’re good for those moments when you haven’t got much bandwidth for anything too demanding.

Let’s stay in Norfolk, but delve once more into the past. Victoria Mackenzie’s For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain. Two female medieval mystics, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe tell their stories in alternating short chapters. Julian is the better known figure, for her ‘Revelations of Divine Love‘, written when she was an anchoress, enclosed in a tiny windowed cell abutting a Norwich church. Both she and the other figure in the book, Marjorie Kent, had visions. Whereas Julian chooses to see little, but see it intensely, Marjorie is very different. Illiterate and rambunctious, with little time for her husband and children, she loudly proclaims her visions of Christ to anyone who will listen, and indeed these who do not wish to listen. Both took risks. To go against current Christian orthodoxy, especially as a woman, risked excommunication and a painful death. In the book, and we cannot know if this happened, the two meet, and this unlikely pair make a genuine connection. Beautifully written, and quickly read, this is a book that will stay with me for a long time.

Finally, a book I haven’t read, but intend to because I heard snatches of it being read as BBC’s Book of the Week. Catherine Coldstream’s Cloistered tells the story of her years as a nun in the 1990s, and her eventual flight from the convent – I didn’t hear that bit. And how did I get from a story about two amoral lovers-turned-rivals to the story of women who’ve taken vows of chastity? Ah well. That’s Six Degrees for you!

Next month’s starter is Paul Lynch‘s Prophet Song: a book I very much ejoyed reading last year.

Six Degrees of Separation: from Orbital to Walking the Bones of Britain

Kate: Books are my Favourite and Best

This month’s starter book is the 2024 Booker Prize winner: Samantha Harvey‘s Orbital. I loved it. This book moves through space with six astronauts, viewing the spectacular and the ordinary, distance and intimacy and invites us, the readers, to wonder too.

My first link is by book title as much as subject matter. Constellation by Adrien Bosc has pilots rather than astronauts at the heart of his story. Based on an actual plane crash that took place in 1947 in the Azores, on a flight from Paris to New York. Bosc was fascinated by the mysterious history of this tragedy, for which there was little explanation. The flight was carrying a number of well-known people, as well as a group of Basque shepherds. The book tells the story of many of these people, and gives them a voice, as well as piecing together what he can about the story of the crash itself. An interesting blend of actual facts and a degree of surmise. Here’s a story about the inter-connectedness of collective tragedy, engagingly told.

My next book begins with dealing with the elemental natural world in a different way: the sea this time. Mallachy Tallack‘s That Beautiful Atlantic Waltz is a quiet book, telling a story with its roots in the 1950s, when the main protagonists’s father Sonny was working in brutal conditions on a whaling ship before returning to the Shetlands to ask Kathleen to marry him. Jack is their son, and grows up unable to find his place in life, except through the medium of the country and western music he loves. The story of Sonny, Kathleen and especially Jack interweave to tell a story with no great dramas, but which lyrically evoke their simple Shetland lives.

The elements and the natural world come to the fore in my next book, written for children: Leila and the Blue Fox by Kiran Millwood Hargrave. A lovely book for older children, this story is told as much by the glorious blue and black illustrations that illuminate the action described. This is a story of migration. Of Leila, a Syrian asylum seeker who lives in London with her aunt and cousin. Of her mother, who is now an academic in northern Norway, studying climate change as it affects the animal population of the Arctic. And of Miso, the Arctic fox whom she and her fellow research scientists are tracking as she completes her 2000 mile migration from the eastern Arctic to Canada. Leila comes to spend her summer with her mother as the research project evolves by going to follow the little fox ‘in person’. It’s an opportunity to discover the raw beauty of the Arctic, the courage and steadfastness of one little fox, and most importantly, a chance or Leila and her mother to discover and rediscover their bond. A story that invites thought and reflection on the whole issue of migration, and the issues which face those obliged to migrate, whether human or animal.

From Elements to Weather, British style. 188 Words for Rain, by Alan Connor. When I noticed this title at the library, I knew immediately I wanted to read it. A tour of the British Isles looking at all the different words that have evolved over the years to describe this most British of weather phenomena in all its manifestations? I was in! And it WAS interesting, reminding me of many terms I know, and many more that I don’t. Together with engaging weather-related factoids. But it was held together by pointess little anecdotes of imaginary people and their experience of these phenomena, intended to drive the narrative along, but which only succeeded in irritating me. A good idea spoilt.

Now why should a book about rain lead me to a book about walking, eh? Must be because I’m English, and a woman who walks. Annabel Abbs‘ Windswept: Why Women Walk is, according to the publisher ‘The story of extraordinary women who lost their way – their sense of self, their identity, their freedom – and found it again through walking in the wild.‘ And this applies to Abbs herself, who interweaves episodes from her own walking life with the stories of famous women, not noted as walkers, such as Simone de Beauvoir and Gwen John, to whom walking was a fundamental need and source of renewal and refreshment.

Which brings me to my last book: Walking the Bones of Britain by Christopher Somerville. What a rich and immersive book this is. For a small island, our geological story is particularly rich. Somerville undertakes to walk it, from the north of Scotland down as far, slightly oddly I thought, only to the River Thames. And this is what he does. He’s curious to examine the geology of every path he takes, and to understand what effect the geological story has had on the development of the landscape and how it has been exploited by the people who live in it. He’s investigative, humorous, personable in his enquiries, which makes what could be a difficult book approachable. This book has opened my eyes to the landscape, both locally and more widely throughout Britain.Which brings us full circle. In Orbital, our astronauts see the whole earth spread beneath them as they orbit the planet, whereas Somerville examines just a small portion of the planet in forensic detail.

Next month’s starter book is one I don’t know, by an author I don’t know either. Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos.