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.

The starting book this month is the startling and lyrical No one is talking about this by Patrica Lockwood. I found it very much a book of two halves, with the first being about how the internet has shaped our brains - fragmented, looking for a fix and drowning in useless information. Many people these days have decided to limit their time online in a bid to reverse this. Some have even taken it a step further, such as………

Mark Boyle in ‘The way home - tales from a life without technology’ where he lives on a smallholding in the west of Ireland, without any electricity or technology, surviving off the land. This is a a sincere and brutally honest account of Marks attempt to live in a way similar to that of our ancestors - to find a way home. Speaking of home…….

I have arrived, I am home. In the here, In the now. I am solid, I am free. In the ultimate I dwell.

I attended an online meditation retreat via Plum Village in 2021, which was based on the teachings of the venerated Vietnamese Buddhist Monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who passed away recently in January. One of his incredibly helpful books is ‘The art of living’. Known as ‘The father of mindfulness’ the phrase above is about returning to the present, to the here and to the now. Back home. Home……

…’Sweet home’ was the first collection of short stories by Wendy Erskine, and the follow up ‘Dance Moves’ is due for release later in February. The people in these stories seems all too real, with wonderfully crisp dialogue and a dark seam of black humour. The stories are mostly based in and around Belfast, and Wendy is based in the east of the city, as is……

…Jan Carson, author of the wonderful ‘The raptures’ recently released in January. It’s about a group of schoolchildren who, one by one, fall ill to a mysterious illness in the 1990’s. Set in a small community in the North of Ireland, it’s about faith, community, family and shared trauma and is both moving and darkly funny. Shared trauma is something also evident in………..

‘Five little Indians’ by Michelle Good, a heartbreaking, dark and compassionate book about First Nation children who survived the residential school system in Canada, after being wrenched from their families. It’s an incredibly readable story but it also made me fairly angry. Another book which featured someone stuck in a cycle of abuse and trauma but who ultimately survived was……

Kerri Ní Dochartaigh in ‘Thin Places’, a powerful and emotional memoir that covers nature, trauma and politics. It’s incredibly raw and intense at times, but ultimately moves towards healing and hope.

That’s it for this months six degrees of separation. As usual, I’ve just rolled with the flow, and I don’t think there’s a right or wrong way of doing this challenge, which suits me.