First Friday of the month, so time for six degrees of separation, hosted by Kate over at Books are my favourite and best. 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 the starting point is ‘The end of the affair’ by Graham Greene. It’s my choice of audiobook at the moment, ‘performed’ by Colin Firth but I just haven’t finished it yet. Most of the story takes place in the aftermath of WW2 and one important memory takes place during a bombing raid…..

…….which is very much part of ‘These days’ by Lucy Caldwell, a story of the two Bell sisters during the Belfast blitz. Some of the scenes are hellish……

……which leads to ‘A small corner of hell - despatches from Chechnya’ by journalist Anna Politkovskaya, later murdered, who was a well known critic of the Russian Government. I read this book about twelve years ago, and as you’d expect it’s an incredibly grim read about what war does to people. Hell also contains demons……

…..and the late Mark Lanegan sure had a few of those in ‘Sing backwards and weep’ one of the most raw and unflinching autobiographies I’ve ever read, detailing his life as a rock singer and drug addict, and so well written. He was a good friend of the much missed……..

………Anthony Bourdain, writer of ‘Kitchen confidential: Adventure’s in the culinary underbelly’ who encouraged Lanegan to write his life story, but only if he did it with honesty. Another friend of Bourdain’s was….

…..the late A.A. Gill, who wrote an autobiography called ‘Pour me’ (in my TBR pile) detailing his own experiences with addiction. Gill was a food critic and born in Edinburgh, which leads me onto….

….Irvine Welsh’s ‘The Bedroom secrets of the master chefs’, as raucous and wild as we’ve come to expect.

So that’s it for another month. 1940’s postwar London to the kitchens of Edinburghs restaurants via Belfast, Chechnya, Seattle, and New York Bit darker than I intended with hell and addiction aplenty but that’s the way it goes sometimes.