And so we enter – here Downunder – the last month of autumn which makes, I guess, this week’s starting book somewhat prescient with its hints of the darkness to come. Not that Australia experiences the darkness of some, but still… However, I am jumping ahead, because before I tell you about the book I should introduce the meme. It is of course Six Degrees, and if you don’t know it and how it works, please check Kate’s blog – booksaremyfavouriteandbest.

The first rule is that Kate sets our starting book. This month, she nominated another book I haven’t read, though it’s been popping up in awards lists recently, including a longlisting for this year’s Stella Prize, and is by an Australian author I have in my sights. The book is Charlotte McConaghy’s Wild dark shore.

This book is ripe for links, with its various prize listings, its island setting, its cli-fi credentials, and its having a mystery at its core (apparently), but I’m going somewhere a bit different albeit relates to the climate issue. GoodReads tells me that it is set on Shearwater, a tiny weather-lashed island that is home to the world’s largest seed bank. So, my link is to the first novel I read that dealt with a seed bank, Annabel Smith’s The ark (my review). It made quite an impression on me, and not only because it was set in the Snowy Mountains which I love so much.

One of the reasons it made such an impression was its form. As I wrote in my review, it is a “modern” epistolary novel told through a variety of textual communications – emails, a blog, memos, reports, minutes of meetings, and news articles. Johanna Bell’s Department of the Vanishing (my review) is not exactly epistolary but it too is told through a variety of documents – lists, reports, minutes, notes, interviews, prose poems. In a second link to The ark, its subject matter is also about the drive to preserve natural history due to climate change.

Johanna Bell’s focus is birds, the extinction of species, with one species in particular threading through her novel, the lyrebird. Another novel which has one bird species threading through it is Carrie Tiffany’s Mateship with birds (my review), though in her case it’s kookaburras – and, while it’s set in a farming community, it’s not so much climate change-driven. The birds, however, do have something to do with Tiffany’s commentary on humanity.

Shifting a little from form and content, my next link relates to the author. Carrie Tiffany is a scientist by training, and so is Barbara Kingsolver. I have not read any of her environment-driven books, since blogging, though Demon Copperhead (my review) does have a nod to science in that it was inspired by the OxyContin epidemic in the USA – and who created OxyContin?

Demon Copperhead falls into that group of books I call big, baggy monsters, most of which – at least those I read – tend to be focused on social justice issues, so my next link is to another big baggy monster dealing with social issues. It is Andrew O’Hagan’s Caledonian Road (my review). It deals with a whole grab bag of contemporary issues – including toxic masculinity; intergenerational wars; racism; modern technology with its related concerns like security, privacy, hacking, and digital identity; disruption as activist action; financial corruption and malfeasance; foreign interference; and human trafficking – all of which are overlaid and connected by the traditional biggies – class, entitlement and privilege, economic inequality.

For my final link, I am picking up on an issue that brings about O’Hagan’s protagonist’s downfall. Campbell does not understand his privilege and the precarity of the lives of others. He is also confident in his charm. So it is that he is easily taken advantage of because he doesn’t fully understand technology, and trusts others. My link is to Colum McCann’s Twist (my review) which was inspired by McCann’s realisation of how vulnerable we are to sabotage of the cables beneath the sea that, essentially, carry our lives (our banking, our medical records, our private communications with each other, and so on). Should we be so trusting?

So, while my books have crossed the seas from Australia to the USA to England, before ending on the coast of Africa, most of them have had strong messages about modern sociopolitical issues. As is common in my chains, two of the four are by men. Less common is the fact that all are contemporary set.

Have you read Wild dark shore? And, whether or not you have, what would you link to?