Six Degrees of Separation: From The Matchbox Girl to Ace, King, Knave

It’s the first Saturday of the month which means it’s time for another Six Degrees of Separation, hosted by Kate of Books are my Favourite and Best. The idea is that Kate chooses a book to use as a starting point and then we have to link it to six other books of our choice to form a chain. A book doesn’t have to be connected to all of the others on the list – only to the one next to it in the chain. This month Kate has said that we should start with either our book group’s current read or the book we’re currently reading. I’m not in a book group so it has to be the latter for me. I actually put this chain together in the last week of August (I like to prepare it in advance), so I used the book I was reading at that time, which was The Matchbox Girl by Alice Jolly. The Matchbox Girl won this year’s Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. It’s set in Nazi controlled Vienna and is narrated by Adelheid Brunner, a girl with autism who collects matchboxes. I’m using collections as my…