Book of the week

BOOK OF THE WEEK with Linda Jennings. Shopaholic to the Rescue, Sophie Kinsella, ISBN 978-1784160364 (Black Swan) BD4.500 for Gulf Weekly Book Club members

To Las Vegas . . . and beyond!

Becky Brandon (née Bloomwood) is on a major rescue mission. Hollywood was full of surprises, and now she’s on a road trip to Las Vegas to help her friends and family.

She’s determined to get to the bottom of why her dad has mysteriously disappeared, help her best friend Suze and even bond with Alicia Long-legs (maybe...).

As Becky discovers just how much her friends and family need help, she comes up with her biggest, boldest, most brilliant plan yet! So, can she save the day just when they need her most?

Becky is setting out to make things right in this laugh-out-loud, feel-good conclusion to her American adventure that began with Shopaholic to the Stars.

READ IT NOW IN PAPERBACK
A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara, ISBN 978-1447294832 (Picador), BD5 for Gulf Weekly Book Club members

A Little Life is an immensely powerful and heart-breaking novel of brotherly love and the limits of human endurance.

When four graduates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they’re broke, adrift and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition.

There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry into the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their centre of gravity.

Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success and pride.

Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realise, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome – but that will define his life forever.

My favourite read of the week
The Shepherd’s Life: A Tale of the Lake District, James Rebanks, ISBN 978-0141979366 (Penguin), BD5 for Gulf Weekly Book Club members

‘The surprise hit of the year’, according to the UK newspaper, The Daily Mail.

Some people’s lives are entirely their own creations. James Rebanks’ isn’t. The first son of a shepherd, who was the first son of a shepherd himself, he and his family have lived and worked in and around the Lake District for generations.

Their way of life is ordered by the seasons and the work they demand, and has been for hundreds of years. A Viking would understand the work they do: sending the sheep to the fells in the summer and making the hay; the autumn fairs where the flocks are replenished; the gruelling toil of winter when the sheep must be kept alive, and the light-headedness that comes with spring, as the lambs are born and the sheep get ready to return to the fells.