6 Degrees of Separation

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.

Thanks to book blogger Kate for once again sponsoring 6 Degrees of Separation. This month we begin with the winner of the 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award, Ghost Cities by Siang Lu.

Description from Goodreads:

Ghost Cities – inspired by the vacant, uninhabited megacities of China – follows multiple narratives, including one in which a young man named Xiang is fired from his job as a translator at Sydney’s Chinese Consulate after it is discovered he doesn’t speak a word of Chinese and has been relying entirely on Google Translate for his work. How is his relocation to one such ghost city connected to a parallel odyssey in which an ancient Emperor creates a thousand doubles of Himself? Or where a horny mountain gains sentience? Where a chess-playing automaton hides a deadly secret? Or a tale in which every book in the known Empire is destroyed – then re-created, page by page and book by book, all in the name of love and art? Allegorical and imaginative, Ghost Cities will appeal to readers of Haruki Murakami and Italo Calvino.

One reader wrote on Goodreads, “Ghost Cities is deeply philosophical, confronting themes of displacement, constructed identity, and the very act of storytelling as survival.”

first degree

Another book that is “allegorical and imaginative,” a fantasy confronting themes of displacement, identity, and storytelling, is 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami.

second degree

The fantasy novel Babel by R.F. Kuang also deals with the themes of displacement, identity, and storytelling.

third degree

But fantasy isn’t the only genre capable of exploring such themes. In the science fiction novel The Blinds by Adam Sternbergh, the characters have been displaced to a self-contained compound resembling a small town after agreeing to have their memories erased. The memory erasure means they have to create new identities for themselves in relation to other inhabitants of the town.

fourth degree

Leaning into the word blinds from the previous title brings up Rock, Paper, Scissors by Alice Feeney, in which the main character suffers from face blindness.

fifth degree

And the title of Feeney’s novel leads to The Hot Rock, the first novel in the comic-caper Dortmunder series by Donald E. Westlake.

sixth degree

Drowned Hopes by Donald E. Westlake is the most serious novel in the Dortmunder series in terms of the consequences of the caper.

© 2025 by Mary Daniels Brown