It is now autumn here Down Under, and, like our summer, it’s a strange one – cooler and wetter than “normal”. Oops, we need to get used to the fact that in this world of change, there is no “normal” anymore, “new” or otherwise. Anyhow, ’nuff said. Let’s get onto our Six Degrees of Separation meme. If you don’t know how it works, please check out meme host Kate’s blog – booksaremyfavouriteandbest.

The first rule is that Kate sets our starting book – and after a two-book run, we are back to normal (did I say that!) by which I mean to a starting book I haven’t read, Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain. It won several awards, including the 2020 Booker Prize. I’d like to read it.

Now, I considered many links for this – subject, titled for main character, Scottish setting, but in the end I’ve gone with the obvious, another Booker Prize winner. I used to read them all, but since blogging I’ve only read a handful, but I did have a choice, and the one I’ve chosen doesn’t really have any other obvious links with Shuggie Bain besides both being winners, but I’m sticking with it, New Zealander Eleanor Catton’s The luminaries (my review).

It’s an historical novel set on the goldfields of New Zealand’s West Coast, and is grand and ambitious in its conception. Somewhat less grand, but nonetheless, also an historical novel set in a mining community is South African writer Karen Jennings’ Upturned earth (my review). Inspired by a real character, it’s primarily about corrupt powerful men destroying the lives of the powerless men in their employ, and the challenge of standing up to them.

Another novel about corrupt men – in this case police and justice officials – destroying the lives of powerless others is the crime novel I read in March for Kim’s (Reading Matters) Southern Cross Crime Month, Garry Disher’s Bitter Wash Road (my review). It is set in a tiny, poor community in rural South Australia and is about a demoted police officer’s struggles to solve a crime in a situation where he doesn’t know which colleagues he can trust.

My next book is also titled for the name of a road, but it is set in one of the world’s busiest capital cities, Helene Hanff’s delightful book, 84 Charing Cross Road (my review). Now a classic, you probably know it, but if not, it comprises the charming letters between American writer and bibliophile Helene Hanff and bookseller Frank Doel of Marks & Co, a London bookshop which specialised in secondhand and antiquarian books.

For my next link, we are staying in England, and sticking with letters, this time with a classic epistolary novel, Maria Edgeworth’s Leonora (my review). Published in 1806, it lacks the subtlety of Austen’s novels, the first of which was published in 1811, but it’s interesting for Edgeworth’s exploration of English and French “sensibilities” during Napoleonic times.

And so, I’m going to stay with this time period and conclude with Caroline Moorhead’s Dancing to the precipice (my review) which is a biography of French aristocrat Henriette-Lucy, Marquise de La Tour-du-Pin-Gouvernet, from her birth in 1770 to her death in 1853. It’s a wild ride, but a fascinating story about survival in tricky political times.

So, again we’ve roamed around a bit, from Scotland to New Zealand to South Africa, over to Australia before returned to Europe where we stayed for the last three books. We time travelled a bit covering many time periods between the late 1700s to contemporary times. Five of my links were written by women.

Now, the usual: Have you read Shuggie Bain? And, regardless, what would you link to?

So our strange Antipodean summer has ended, and I, for one, am sad. How often did I, this year, get to wear my summer frocks? More often than I needed to, actually, because I hated seeing them lonely in the wardrobe. I know there are people who hate the heat, and I know that it was great to have had some good soakings of rain this year, but still … a few more hot summer days would have been appreciated. With the whinge over, I’ll get to something I’ll never whinge about, our Six Degrees of Separation meme. If you don’t know how it works, please check out meme host Kate’s blog – booksaremyfavouriteandbest.

The first rule is that Kate sets our starting book – and wonder of wonders, for the second month in a row, I’ve read the starting book, Julia Baird’s Phosphorescence (my review). It wasn’t one I would normally have read, but it was a reading group choice, and like most of my reading group’s choices – because we have a great group of interesting women – I was glad I did read it. Subtitled On awe, wonder, and things that sustain you when the world goes dark, it sounds like it could be a self-help book. It is a bit, but not entirely.

So, the obvious choice for a link would be come sort of other self-help book – or memoir about surviving great odds. I suppose at a push, my next book could be seen as the latter, but it’s not really, so that’s not the linking point. The link is that, Stan Grant, the author of Talking to my country (my review), is an occasional host of ABC TV’s The Drum program for which Baird is one of the two founding hosts.

I have heard Stan Grant speak in person in an ANU/Canberra Times Literary Event, and my, was he impressive. The first such event I attended after I started blogging was back in 2010 when I heard (and saw, of course) Marion Halligan converse with the English author Sarah Waters about her latest novel at the time, The little stranger (my review). She’s quietened down a bit lately, hasn’t she?

I could then, but I’m not going to, link on authors who have quietened down. Instead I’m linking on the fact that both Waters’ novel and Shokoofeh Azar’s The enlightenment of the greengage tree (my review) deal in some way with ghosts, albeit Waters’ book is a more traditional ghost story while Azar’s ghosts are of quite a different spirit.

Azar migrated to Australia from Iran, and her novel, while not exactly autobiographical, draws from the experiences of friends and family under Ayatollah Khomeini’s dictatorial regime. Elizabeth Kuiper was much younger than Azar when she migrated to Australia – with her mother – from Robert Mugabe’s dictatorial regime in Zimbabwe. Her novel, Little stones (my review), does have an autobiographical element.

Kuiper’s protagonist and first-person narrator is 11-year-old Hannah. Another novel – or novella in this case – with an 11-year-old narrator is Nick Earls’ NoHo (my review), which is set in Los Angeles (North Hollywood if you want to know!) although Earls is very definitely Aussie.

NoHo is part of a (subtly linked, apparently) novella series by Earls, called Wisdom Tree. My last link is going to be a bit cheeky, because it draws on this idea of a novella series. I say cheeky because Nigel Featherstone’s three novellas published by Blemish Press were not originally conceived as a series. It’s just that at the end of a month’s writer’s retreat in Launceston, many years ago now, he found he had sketches for three novellas, and Blemish published all three. As NoHo is the last of Earls’ 5-book series, I’ll link to Beach volcano (my review) which is the last of Featherstone’s. Their subject matter is very different but both books are about sons and brothers – one 11-year-old, one 44-year-old – who are facing challenges in their lives! I’ll leave it at that…

So, hmm, where have we been this month. All over the shop really. While nearly all this month’s authors are Australian, or Australian-based now, they have taken us not only to Australia, but England, Iran, Zimbabwe and Los Angeles in the USA. That’s a bit of arm-chair travelling for you, though we’ve been through some rocky territory!

Now, the usual: Have you read Phosphorescence? And, regardless, what would you link to?

What a strange summer we’ve had. Last year it was fires and smoke, and this year, lower temperatures and rain. I rather like the heat, but it has been good to have a calmer time. Now though to that thing that stayed with us unchanged all through 2020, come hail or shine, come fire or covid, and that thing of course is our Six Degrees of Separation meme. If you don’t know this meme and how it works, please check out meme host Kate’s blog – booksaremyfavouriteandbest.

The first rule is that Kate sets our starting book. This month, she’s chosen a book that I’ve actually read – Anne Tyler’s Redhead by the side of the road (my review)! I rather like Anne Tyler, but I bought this for my Mum not long before she died, and ended up reading it myself. The titular redhead is not what you might think.

This was a fun choice for our starting book, because I could think of all sorts of options to follow, but in the end, I decided to go with another redhead, this one in António Lobo Antunes’ The natural order of things (my review). His redhead is a real one, although there are those who have imaginings about her.

My links are hopping about quite a bit this month. The obvious one would have been Charlotte Wood’s similarly titled The natural way of things, but instead I’ve chosen another Portuguese author with a triple barrel name, José Jorge Letria and his lovely book, If I were a book (my review), which is a quirky little love letter to the book and reading.

And now, I’m using the title “If” to move to the Queensland Writers Centre and its innovative If: Book Australia program, which Im not sure is still going but was about exploring the future of the book and digital literature. One exciting project it supported was Writing black, edited by Ellen van Neerven (my review) and published as an Apple iBook.

Writing black is an anthology of new writings by Indigenous Australians. For this next link, I am using content, and choosing another innovative anthology of Indigenous Australian writing, Too deadly: Our voice, our way, our business, by a Canberra- based writing group, Us Mob Writing (my review).

I am going to stick with content again, by choosing another anthology. However, this link is a double one, because this particular anthology, The near and the far, Volume 2, edited by David Carlin and Francesca Rendle-Short (my review), comprises pieces written by another (sort of) writing group. The group is WrICE (Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange) which brings writers from Australia and Asia-Pacific together in writing residencies.

And finally, a rather cheeky link from the writer of the Foreword of The near and the far, Maxine Beneba Clark, to her memoir of growing up in western Sydney, The hate race (my review). It’s a powerful book about how cruelly people who are different, particarly those with non-white skins, can be treated in Australia.

So, an unusual and highly political month this time, with several books having overtly political messages or content. Three of the books are anthologies, which is also unusual for me, and only the first of my six links is a novel. We have though travelled widely from Baltimore in the USA, though Portugal, Australia, Asia and the Pacific, and back to Australia again.

Now, the usual: Have you read Redhead by the side of the road (or any other by Anne Tyler)? And, regardless, what would you link to?