6 Degrees of Separation: From Butter to The Cult of Romance

Welcome back to 6 Degrees of Separation, where book lovers start with the same book and link it to six other titles in any random way the mind chooses to find connections.

This month’s starting book, courtesy of Kate from booksaremyfavouriteandbest, is Butter by Asako Yukuki, a novel set in Japan, about food and murder and journalism.

Linda Marigliano’s memoir Love Language is also partly about food as well as family, people pleasing and love (definitely not about murder) – and which I found much to relate to.

The protagonist of Audrey’s Gone Awol by Annie de Monchaux has built a life of pleasing everybody else – and losing herself in the process. That is until Audrey discovers her husband of thirty years has been having an affair and she escapes to her aunt’s cottage in France.

Liz Byrski writes brilliantly about older women and aging, her most recent novel being At the End of the Day about Mim Squires who meets Mathias Vander after their flight home is disrupted.

Another fabulous older character in a novel is Maya from Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens by Shankari Chandran. However, I’ve already used Chai Time in a previous 6 Degrees, so I will instead mention Chandran’s new novel, Safe Haven, which is set partly in a small country town and partly in an offshore detention centre. Safe Haven is a novel that exposes Australia’s dreadful treatment of asylum seekers and refugees through the lens of a mystery/crime narrative, but at its heart is a story about community and friendship and belonging.

Themes of belonging and community are threaded through many novels. I read somewhere that most stories could be described as a stranger coming to town or someone embarking on a journey (an idea variably attributed to Leo Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, but most likely emerging from a writing prompt by John Gardner – visit Quote Investigator for more details). I’d add someone returning to their hometown for any number of reasons, which includes Spring Clean for the Peach Queen by Sasha Wasley, about Lottie Bentz who is going home after 12 years away to escape the disaster that her life has become.

Still on the theme of belonging and not belonging is The Cult of Romance by Sarah Ayoub. Eighteen-year-old Natalie is a Lebanese Australian caught between two cultures in Australia. But she also feels like an outsider when she embarks on a trip to Lebanon for a friend’s wedding. It’s also a story about friendship and family, romance and navigating one’s place in the world, told with both humour and pathos.

Over to You

Where will 6 degrees of separation lead you?

Leave a note in the comments, or head over to booksaremyfavouriteandbest to see where it took other readers.

Next month, the starting book will be the 2024 winner of the International Booker Prize, Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (translated by Michael Hofmann).