It’s time for another adventure in Kate’s 6 Degrees of Separation Meme from her blog, Books Are My Favourite and Best. We are given a book to start with, and from there we free associate six books.
This month’s starting book is the 2023 Booker Prize winner, Prophet Song by Paul Lynch.
Here’s the description from Goodreads:
On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist.
Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and Eilish can only watch helplessly as the world she knew disappears. When first her husband and then her eldest son vanish, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a collapsing society.
How far will she go to save her family? And what – or who – is she willing to leave behind?
Exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive, Prophet Song is a work of breathtaking originality, offering a devastating vision of a country at war and a deeply human portrait of a mother’s fight to hold her family together.
This definitely sounds like a book I’d be interested in. However, it also sounds like a book that I definitely can’t face right now. As a proudly bleeding-heart liberal of the 1960s, I believe that the U.S. is currently on the brink of something terrible. I can’t face daily news headlines any more, and I certainly can’t face this book.
But birds, and their songs, I can deal with.
first degree
Picking up the word song from the title of the starter book, I offer The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather as my first degree entry. I read this a long time ago, probably in high school, and have been thinking lately that I should put it on my list for Rereading September.
second degree
Another book title featuring a bird is Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke. This is the first in her series about Darren Mathews, a Black Texas Ranger. I have this book in my audiobook library, so this is my reminder that I should get to it.
third degree
Another bird features in The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare. This 1958 novel received the 1959 Newberry Medal. The book is set in the 17th century colony of Connecticut in the New World. I grew up in Connecticut, where this book was required reading in elementary school.
fourth degree
The rook, a Eurasian crow and another black bird, figures in the title of Kate Atkinson’s most recent Jackson Brodie novel, Death at the Sign of the Rook. I don’t recall any birds putting in an appearance in the story, but the book is set at The Sign of the Rook.
fifth degree
The first novel in Ann Cleeves’ Shetland mystery series also features a black bird. Raven Black introduces detective Jimmy Perez, who solves crimes across the Shetland islands.
sixth degree
I end with The Birds by Daphne du Maurier. Appropriately, the generic title covers all the species of birds I haven’t mentioned. And also appropriately, the book conveys the overall sense of existential dread that currently prevents me from wanting to tackle the prize-winning book Prophet Song.
Are you participating in 6 Degrees of Separation this month? If so, I’d love to see where your chain takes you. You can leave your link in a comment.
© 2025 by Mary Daniels Brown
OMG… The Birds… I saw the movie and to this day it gives me nightmares. I could never read that one. Even so… what a lovely chain!
I totally agree, Davida. It was the movie that originally drew me in. I have read the book since seeing the movie, but the movie is what sticks in my mind. Those ominous creatures circling overhead . . .