Six Degrees of Separation – After Story to The Lie of the Land

By / Six Degrees of Separation / / 28 Comments

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.

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This month we’re starting with Larissa Behrendt’s After Story which I haven’t read but the blurb tells me that it’s about a mother and daughter who visit Britain’s literary sites in an effort to help heal the wounds of a past tragedy, mentioning the Brontës, Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf.

I could have picked up on any one of those three, but it was Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway that popped into my head.

Fiona Melrose’s Johannesburg is an enjoyable South African take on Woolf’s novel.

Leading me to Gil Scott Heron’s posthumous memoir The Last Holiday because I can’t say Johannesburg without hearing his song of the same name in my head and remembering bellowing it out across a Somerset field in early Womad days.

Heron was a poet as well as a musician leading me to another poet’s memoir The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah. Sadly, both are no longer with us.

Zephaniah was born in Birmingham the setting for my favourite novel by Jonathan Coe, The Rotters’ Club.

Coe’s novels frequently have a state-of-the-nation theme running through them as do Amanda Craig’s. I thought The Lie of the Land, her Brexit novel, was much better than Coe’s Middle England.

This month’s Six Degrees has taken me from a tour of literary Britain to a state-of-the-nation novel set in Cornwall with a brief stop in South Africa along the way. 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.

28 thoughts on “Six Degrees of Separation – After Story to The Lie of the Land”

  5. mallikabooks15

    Enjoyed your chain, Susan. The only one I’ve read is Mrs Dalloway and your mention of it and Johannesburg reminded me I need to revisit the book itself before I start an essay on it I have waiting on my TBR. Somehow (with the exception of Flush), I’ve got on better with her essays than her fiction so far.

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