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.

First book this time around was ‘True history of the Kelly Gang’ by Peter Carey which I read and enjoyed about twenty years ago. I have visited Old Melbourne Gaol, whereNed Kelly was imprisoned. He was an outlaw, as was….

…Brendan ‘The dark’ Hughes, an IRA volunteer often on the run from the British army. In Patrick Radden Keefe’s masterful work of narrative non fiction, ‘Say nothing’.One of the earlier sequences wouldn’t be out of place in an action thriller. Hughes was eventually caught, returned to prison before escaping in a rolled up carpet in the back of a bin lorry, before being caught again, hiding in plain sight as a toy salesman whilst living in leafy middle class Belfast suburb. Which is also one of the settings in….

‘Trespasses’ by Louise Kennedy, an evocative and powerful love story set against the backdrop of the troubles in 1970’s Belfast. A secret love affair also takes place in….

‘Young Mungo’ by Douglas Stuart, an immersive and visceral story set amongst the tenements of 1990’s Glasgow. Some of the most important scenes take place in a dovecote, and birds of a different kind also feature in….

‘Songbirds’ by Christy Lefteri, a moving tale of missing migrants set in Cyprus. It’s hard to mention songbirds without mentioning….

‘Birdsong’ by Sebastian Faulks, which I also read back in 2002, a poetic and heartbreaking novel set in Frances during the Great War. I remember the scenes set in the trenches being incredibly harrowing, and the tension in the tunnels unbearable. Speaking of tunnels….

‘Black Echo’ by Micheal Connelly is the first in the Harry Bosch series, where a body turns up in a drainpipe in LA, who turns out to be one of Harrys’s fellow ‘tunnel rats’ from the Vietnam war. Harry follows the clues towards a a heist being planned underneath the city in this tightly plotted thriller from one of the best around. This was the one that started me onto Bosch, and I’ve read everything since.

That’s it for this month.