Six Degrees of Separation: The Correspondent to Letters from Skye

Welcome to this month's edition of Six Degrees of Separation, which is a monthly meme hosted by Kate from Books Are My Favourite and Best. The idea is to start with a specific book and make a series of links from one book to the next using whatever link you can find and see where you end up after six links. I am also linking this post up with The Sunday Salon, hosted by Deb at Readerbuzz and A Good Book and a Cup of Tea hosted at Boondock Ramblings.

This month the starting point is The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, which by coincidence I had already requested from the library and so I was able to read before doing this post. In some ways that should make it easier, but the reality is, with the type of book it is, I found multiple possible starting points. 

In the book, our main character Sybil writes letters to anyone and everyone. She writes to her family, to people she has known over the years, to college deans and to authors who sometimes write back. At one point I had a different option but as soon as I saw that Sybil had written to Diana Gabaldon, author of Outlander (or Cross Stitch as it was known here) I knew I had my starting point!

The Outlander books hold a very special place in my reading heart. They were almost like gateway books back to reading and also led me down the path to discovering many other great authors including one of my absolute favourite authors. I never miss an opportunity to include Susanna Kearsley in a Six Degrees post. The question is which book? I am going with The King's Messenger which I reviewed here.

Through Diana Gabaldon and then Susanna Kearsley I learned about the Jacobites. Another book I read which included a Jacobite story was The Secrets of the Rose by Nicola Cornick! (my review)

When I visited the Kelvingrove museum in Glasgow a couple of years ago I was very interested in the Jacobite artifacts but there was one display that really stopped me in tracks and that was about the removal of all the inhabitants of the island of St Kilda back in the 1930s. I had read about it in Karen Swan's trilogy which started with The Last Summer.

If I think about islands of Scotland then I can't go past the Isle of Skye which leads to the only non historical fiction books on my list this week. Sue Moorcroft has a trilogy set on the Isle of Skye which starts with the book A Skye Full of Stars (my review)

Also featuring the Isle of Skye is Letters from Skye by Jessica Brockmole which I reviewed here. This also happens to be an epistolary novel so that brings me full circle this month!

Next month's starting point is a book I would like to read, Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

Will you be joining us?