Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
BOOK OF THE WEEK with Linda Jennings. THE PRESIDENT’S GARDENS, Muhsin Al-Ramli (Translated from Arabic by Luke Leafgren)
ISBN 9780857056788 (QUERCUS) BD6.300 for Gulf Weekly Book Club members
One Hundred Years of Solitude meets The Kite-Runner in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
On the third day of Ramadan, the village wakes to find the severed heads of nine of its sons stacked in banana crates by the bus stop.
One of them belonged to one of the most wanted men in Iraq, known to his friends as Ibrahim the Fated.
How did this good and humble man earn the enmity of so many? What did he do to deserve such a death?
The answer lies in his lifelong friendship with Abdullah Kafka and Tariq the Befuddled, who each have their own remarkable stories to tell.
It lies on the scarred, irradiated battlefields of the Gulf War and in the ashes of a revolution strangled in its cradle.
It lies in the steadfast love of his wife and the festering scorn of his daughter.
And, above all, it lies behind the locked gates of The President’s Gardens, buried alongside the countless victims of a pitiless reign of terror.
READ IT NOW
SMALL GREAT THINGS, Jodi Picoult, Isbn 9781444788044 (HODDER)
BD3.900 for Gulf Weekly Book Club members
The best books make you see differently. This is one of them. The eye-opening new novel from Jodi Picoult, deals with the biggest of themes: birth, death and responsibility.
Soon to be a major film starring Viola Davis and Julia Roberts.
When a newborn baby dies after a routine hospital procedure, there is no doubt about who will be held responsible: the nurse who had been banned from looking after him by his father.
What the nurse, her lawyer and the father of the child cannot know is how this death will irrevocably change all of their lives, in ways both expected and not.
Small Great Things is about prejudice and power; it is about that which divides and unites us.
It is about opening your eyes.
My favourite
read of the week
THE SCIENCE OF GAMES OF THRONES, Helen Keen, Isbn 9781473632318 (HODDER) BD8.200 for Gulf Weekly Book Club members
Yes, the new series that we have all been waiting for is back on OSN next month, so what better way to while away the intervening weeks than read a myth-busting, mind-blowing, jaw-dropping and fun-filled expedition through the world of Game of Thrones.
Do dragons actually exist? Is it possible to crush a person’s head with your bare hands? What really happened when royal families interbreed?
How does wildfire win wars? Can you really kill someone with molten gold?
Award-winning comedian and popular-science writer Helen Keen uncovers the astounding science behind the world’s most popular television show.
Join Helen as she sifts the fact from fantasy, discovers the truth beneath the togas, and reveals a world more fantastical than Daenerys Targaryen’s wildest dreams.
So pour yourself a bowl of brown, climb on your beast of burden and prepare yourself for an amazing adventure. It’s time to see the Seven Kingdoms as you have never seen them before.
