Six Degrees of Separation – Wild Dark Shore to This is Happiness

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 Australian author Charlotte McConaghy’s Wild Dark Shore which I’ve not read but I gather from the blurb features a woman who is washed up on the shore of a remote island near Antarctica.

McConaghy’s compatriot M L Stedman’s The Light Between Oceans sees a dinghy washed up containing a living child and her dead father on an island which the childless lighthouse keeper’s wife accepts as a gift from God

In Sheila Armstrong’s Falling Animals huge efforts are made to identify the corpse of a man found on an Irish beach.

Jim Crace’s Being Dead describes the decomposition of a couple’s corpses found on a beach.

In case you’re thinking enough already with the dead bodies, my next link is by landform to Alex Garland’s The Beach although there is a fatal shark attack as I remember.

A magnet for young hedonists, Garland’s fabled beach is in Thailand where part of Joan Silber’s Secrets of Happiness is set.

My final link is by title to Niall Williams’s This is Happiness.

This month’s Six Degrees has taken a rather grisly route from a research station close to Antarctica to an Irish coming-of-age novel set in the 1970s. 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.