Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
BOOK OF THE WEEK with Linda Jennings. Revival, Stephen King, ISBN 9781444789171 (Hodder) BD11.200 for Gulf Weekly Book Club members
This latest offering from the master of horror is going to draw you in, keep you trapped and then scare the life out of you at the end. What a pity it wasn’t out in time for Halloween!
A spectacularly dark and electrifying novel about addiction, religion, music and what might exist on the other side of life. In a small New England town, in the early 1960s, a shadow falls over a small boy playing with his toy soldiers. Jamie Morton looks up to see a striking man, the new minister, Charles Jacobs.
Soon they forge a deep bond, based on their fascination with simple experiments in electricity. Decades later, Jamie is living a nomadic lifestyle of bar-band rock ’n’ roll. Now an addict, he sees Jacobs again – a showman on stage, creating dazzling ‘portraits in lightning’ – and their meeting has profound consequences for both men.
Their bond becomes a pact beyond even the Devil’s devising, and Jamie discovers that revival has many meanings. This rich and disturbing novel spans five decades on its way to the most terrifying conclusion Stephen King has ever written. It’s a masterpiece from King, in the great American tradition of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe.
* Read it now in paperback
The Kill, Jane Casey, ISBN 9780091948382 (Ebury) BD4 for Gulf Weekly Book Club members
Crime is a family affair for writer Jane Casey. Married to a criminal barrister, she has a unique insight in the brutal underbelly of urban life, from the smell of a police cell to the darkest motives of a serial killer.
Emerging as one of Ireland’s most accomplished crime writers, this explosive thriller featuring Anglo-Irish detective Maeve Kerrigan (the youngest member of the Met’s Murder Squad) is a dark thrilling page-turner set in South London.
A killer is terrorising London but this time the police are the targets. Urgently reassigned to investigate a series of brutal attacks on fellow officers, Maeve Kerrigan and her boss Josh Derwent have little idea what motivates the killer’s fury against the force. But they know it will only be a matter of time before the killer strikes again.
Casey might not be known to many GulfWeekly readers, but I do recommend this particular novel as a good book to start with. It ticks all the boxes for a great crime novel and was shortlisted for the Irish Crime Novel of the Year Award (for the fourth time – surely she is going to win it soon?)
* My favourite read-of-the-week
Alan Turing: The Enigma, Andrew Hodges, ISBN 9781784700089 (Vintage) BD5 for Gulf Weekly Book Club members
This is the official story that has inspired the British film which should be on at cinemas in Bahrain soon, The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley; a nail-biting race against time following Alan Turing the pioneer of modern-day computing and credited with cracking the German Enigma code and his brilliant team at Britain’s top-secret code-breaking centre, Bletchley Park, during the darkest days of the Second World War.
Turing’s contribution and genius significantly shortened the war, saving thousands of lives. Taken on by British Intelligence in 1938, as a shy young Cambridge don, he combined brilliant logic with a flair for engineering. In 1940 his machines were breaking the Enigma-enciphered messages of Nazi Germany’s air force. He then headed the penetration of the super-secure U-boat communications.
But his vision went far beyond this achievement. Before the war he had invented the concept of the universal machine, and in 1945 he turned this into the first design for a digital computer.
Turing’s far-sighted plans for the digital era forged ahead into a vision for Artificial Intelligence. However, in 1952 his homosexuality rendered him a criminal and he was subjected to humiliating treatment, so much so that in 1954, aged 41, Alan Turing took his own life.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown released a statement of apology in 2009 on behalf of the British government for the ‘appalling’ treatment of Turing.
