Six Degrees of Separation – The Winter Guest to The Emperor of All Maladies

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 a novella from our reading list to celebrate the start of #NovNov hosted by Cathy and Rebecca. I’ve picked Sarah Moss’s The Winter Guest in which a man and woman meet at a hotel for the first time on Christmas Eve and make a confession.

Marta Pérez-Carbonell’s I Made You Up in My Head is also a novella about a meeting between strangers with consequences.

Carbonell’s strangers meet on a train as do Amanda Craig’s in The Golden Rule, a state-of-the-nation novel.

As is Jonathon Coe’s Bournville which tells the UK’s story through seven shared, emblematic events, beginning with V. E. Day.

Afghanistan/Iraq veteran Harry Parker chose a similar structure, telling the story of an army captain who steps on an IED through forty-five objects in his impressive novel Anatomy of a Soldier.

Another professional who turned to fiction to write about his work is oncologist Austin Duffy, author of This Living and Immortal Thing.

Siddhartha Mukherjee’s illuminating, beautifully written The Emperor of All Maladies is subtitled ‘the biography of cancer’.

This month’s Six Degrees has taken me from a stocking filler novella to an award-winning book about cancer. 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.