Six Degrees of Separation – The Correspondent to If I Knew You Were Going to Be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go

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 Virginia Evans’s Women’s Prize for Fiction longlisted The Correspondent which I’ve yet to read but I gather it’s an epistolary novel.

As is an old favourite of mine: Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford’s Business as Usual whose setting is based on the long-gone book department at Selfridges.

Madeleine St John’s The Women in Black, which came highly recommended by both Karen at Booker Talk and Kim at Reading Matters, is set in in a 1950s Sydney department store.

I’m linking by title to Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black whose TV adaptation was filmed in Laycock not far from where I live.

Laycock is in Wiltshire as is Wolfhall, which becomes Wolf Hall in Hilary Mantel’s novel.

Leading me to Roland Schimmelpfennig’s One Clear Ice-cold January Morning at the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century which follows a wolf from Poland to Berlin.

I could have plumped for any number of novels set in Berlin but instead I’m linking to another even longer, cumbersome title: Judy Chicurel’s If I Knew You Were Going to be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go.

This month’s Six Degrees has taken me from a epistolary novel in which a woman faces her past to a 1970s-set coming-of-age novel with a very long title. 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.