It’s been several years since I last participated in Kate’s Six Degrees meme. I’m not sure why I fell out of the habit, after posting pretty faithfully from February 2020 until August 2023. This month I was drawn back by the individualized starting point: your book club’s current read. (See Kate’s opening post.)

So I start with Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk, which I look forward to rereading for our next meeting in early October, and every link that follows is (or is connected to) a book we’ve read in book club.

#1 H Is for Hawk was a vanguard of a new trend in nature writing that came to dominate the Wainwright Prize list in the UK: blending a hard/sad personal story with a quest that involves travel and/or communion with the natural world. In the case of Macdonald (who now uses they/them pronouns), they work through grief for their father by taking up falconry and training a goshawk.

I went with some members of my book club to see the excellent film starring Claire Foy, followed by a Q&A with the author, earlier this year. Another early example of the misery memoir-meets-nature book vogue was The Outrun by Amy Liptrot (a Wainwright winner), which combines her struggle with alcoholism with her return to the Orkney Islands and her work for the RSPB surveying endangered corncrakes. Another link: I saw the film version with Saoirse Ronan, which probably surpassed the book, with a book club friend. We then tried to get the others interested in rereading it with us, but it only got a few votes.

#2 Liptrot lives in Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire, which is famous for its hippie artists and inclusivity (a Brighton of the North?). Among the other nearby residents (in the village of Mytholmroyd) is Benjamin Myers, whose experimental historical novel about Saint Cuthbert, Cuddy, we discussed in book club a year ago. I had skimmed it when it was first published, and enjoyed it in parts but thought it more pretentious than readable. It was not very well received by most members…

#3 …unlike the quirky and suspenseful Strange Sally Diamond by Liz Nugent, which we’d read the year before and was a hit with almost everyone. Cuddy is set in Northumberland, and I associate Sally with that county because I read it on holiday there.

#4 Sally Diamond has some autistic-like traits, in terms of her lack of understanding of social conventions. We questioned whether this was an attempt by the author to reproduce the effects of trauma. The same book club member brought this up in relation to Sybil Van Antwerp, the protagonist of the most recent Women’s Prize winner, The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, which was our September read. I’d picked up on the characterization of her young friend Harry Landy as autistic, but Sybil herself? That hadn’t occurred to me. It just goes to show how discussing books in a group turns up fresh ideas about them.

#5 We had also talked diagnoses with one of our previous reads, Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason, who scrupulously avoided naming her protagonist’s mental health condition, though it seemed pretty clear to us that it was meant to be bipolar. Another connection: we read that novel as part of our official Women’s Prize shadowing in 2022.

#6 The Correspondent, Sorrow and Bliss, and Patrick Gale’s Notes from an Exhibition, which shares the theme of mental illness, are all among our top 10 reads of all time, with a score of 18.5/20. We’ve read two Gale novels now and he’s a reliable author for us.