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.
This month's starting point is Theory & Practice by Michelle DeKretser, winner of the 2025 Stella Prize.
I have only ever read one book by Michelle DeKretser and that was The Lost Dog which I read back in 2008.
I could have picked one of many books with the word lost in the title. However, I decided to stick with the dog theme so my next link is to To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis. This is a book that I did a buddy read/joint review with Aarti from Booklust many, many years ago and it was a 5/5 read for me. (Part 1 post and then final post)
The most recent book that I did a joint review of was The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak which was with Bree from All the Books I Can Read but I have already used that book a couple of times, which is my limit, and so I am going to go even further back and use another joint review that we did as my next connection. We read and discussed The Dressmaker of Yarrandarah Prison by Meredith Jaffe. I gave this book a 5/5 rating back when I read it in 2021 and still think that the cover of this one is stunning! Here is the first part of our conversation and here is the second.
When I checked my spreadsheet where I record all my reads, I noticed that right before I read that book I had another 5/5 read and that was The Warsaw Orphan by Kelly Rimmer.
Kelly Rimmer has a new book coming out soon which is called The Midnight Estate. I am therefore going to use this as my link to The Tolstoy Estate by Steven Conte which is a book I gave a 5/5 rating to back in 2020.
I saw Steven Conte at the Williamstown Literary Festival back in 2022. In the same post where I talked briefly about that, I mentioned that I was reading Sisters of the Resistance by Christine Wells. This week I won a mug from Christine in a Facebook group I am in!
So there we have it. A couple of joint reviews, some 5/5 reads, and some WWII novels.
Next month, the starting point is 2025 Women’s Prize winner, The Safekeep by Yael Van Der Wouden.
Will you be joining us?
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