Bookclub

BOOK OF THE WEEK with Linda Jennings. That Girl From Nowhere, Dorothy Koomsom, ISBN 978-0099598831(Arrow) BD4.500 for Gulf Weekly Book Club members

‘Where are you coming from with that accent of yours?’ he asks.

‘Nowhere,’ I reply. ‘I’m from nowhere.’ ‘Everyone’s from somewhere,’ he says. ‘Not me,’ I reply silently.

Clemency Smittson was adopted as a baby and the only connection she has to her birth mother is a cardboard box hand- decorated with butterflies.

Now an adult, Clem decides to make a drastic life change and move to Brighton, where she was born. Clem has no idea that while there she’ll meet someone who knows all about her butterfly box and what happened to her birth parents.

As the tangled truths about her adoption and childhood start to unravel, a series of shocking events cause Clem to reassess whether the price of having contact with her birth family could be too high to pay.

READ IT NOW IN PAPERBACK
Pretending to Dance, Diane Chamberlain, ISBN 978-1447211310 (Pan) BD4.500 for Gulf Weekly Book Club members

It’s the summer of 1990 and 14-year-old Molly Arnette lives with her extended family on 100-acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The summer seems idyllic at first.

The mountains are Molly’s playground and she’s well-loved by her father, a therapist famous for books he’s written about a method called ‘Pretend Therapy’; her adoptive mother, who has raised Molly as her own and Amalia, her birth mother who also lives on the family land.

The adults in Molly’s life have created a safe and secure world for her to grow up in. But Molly’s security begins to crumble as she becomes aware of a plan taking shape in her extended family – a plan she can’t stop and that threatens to turn her idyllic summer into a nightmare.

Pretending to Dance by Diane Chamberlain, the bestselling author of The Silent Sister, is a fascinating and deftly- woven novel, that reveals the devastating power of secrets.

My favourite read of the week
Finders Keepers, Stephen King, ISBN 978-1473698956 (Hodder) BD4.500 for Gulf Weekly Book Club members

1978: Morris Bellamy is a reader so obsessed by America’s iconic author John Rothstein that he is prepared to kill for a trove of notebooks containing at least one more unpublished novel.

2009: Pete Saubers, a boy whose father was brutally injured by a stolen Mercedes, discovers a buried trunk containing cash and Rothstein’s notebooks.

2014: After 35 years in prison, Morris is up for parole. And he’s hell-bent on recovering his treasure.

Now it’s up to retired detective Bill Hodges – running an investigative company called ‘Finders Keepers’ – to rescue Pete from an ever-more deranged and vengeful Morris.

Not since Misery has King written with such visceral power about a reader with such a dangerous obsession. Finders Keepers is spectacular suspense, and it is King writing about how literature shapes a life for good, for bad, forever.