Book Club

BOOK OF THE WEEK with Linda Jennings. A New Way Of Cooking With Chocolate, Hotel Chocolat, ISBN 978147222454 (Headline) BD11.200  for Gulf Weekly Book Club members

Chocolate is one of our most popular ingredients – both to eat and to cook with. But how many of us know how truly versatile it is? Hotel Chocolat, the UK’s leading chocolatier, has pioneered ‘cocoa cuisine’ – a new way of cooking with chocolate because, although we know chocolate as a sweet ingredient, cocoa was originally used in savoury recipes.

In fact, cocoa is a ‘super-ingredient’ with many layers of flavour and plenty of goodness too, and this book showcases its many flavours and nuances with over 100 innovative chocolate recipes, both sweet and savoury.

Hotel Chocolat has created energy-boosting recipes for breakfast, savoury recipes that enhance meat and fish dishes as well as give texture and depth to salads and snacks. And, of course, not forgetting the hedonistic qualities that we love so much – with seductive bakes and puddings for all tastes. Find out too how to use the whole bean, from the shell to the nibs, cocoa powder to bar.

Learn how to roast your own beans and even create a bar of your own. Uniquely, each recipe has a Cocoa Factor to indicate the depth of flavour as well as the cocoa percentage and region that will best suit the dish and Angus Thirlwell, Hotel Chocolat’s visionary founder, will also take you through the story of chocolate from pod to plate.

Welcome to cocoa cuisine!

* Read it now in paperback
Wolf, Mo Hayder, ISBN 9780857500793 (Bantam) BD4.500 for Gulf Weekly Book Club members

This is the sensational new Jack Caffery thriller from Mo Hayder, bestselling author of Gone and Poppet.

Mo’s books are 100 per cent authentic, drawing on her long research association with several UK police forces and on her personal encounters with criminals and her novels are among some of the most terrifying crime thrillers you will ever read.

Help Us – when a scrap of paper containing a chilling please is found in the woods, attached to a lost dog, Detective Inspector Jack Caffery inherits both the dog and the investigation. He has no idea who he is searching for, but it’s a race against time.

Who’s afraid? I believe, from what I can hear, that either my daughter or my wife has just been attacked. I don’t know the outcome. The house is silent.

Fourteen years ago two teenage lovers were brutally murdered in a patch of remote woodland. The prime suspect confessed to the crimes and was imprisoned. Now, one family is still trying to put the memory of the killings behind them. But at their isolated hilltop house ... the nightmare is about to return.  l My favourite read-of-the-week

Remember Me Like This, Bret Anthony Johnston, ISBN 9781444788075 (Two Roads) BD4.500 for Gulf Weekly Book Club members

A powerful and affecting novel of a family, it was heard on BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime as well as being a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
What happens to a family when a lost child returns? How can they become a family again?

In the four years since Justin’s abduction his family has become a group of separate units, each nursing their pain and guilt. Now, Justin is back and their happiest moment becomes their most tormenting, as they learn to rebuild their lives during the dramatic course of the long, hot summer.

A gripping literary novel with the pace of a thriller, Remember Me Like This introduces Bret Anthony Johnston as a gifted storyteller. With his sophisticated and emotionally taut plot Johnston reveals how only in caring for each other, can we save ourselves and fearlessly explores the truth behind a mythic happy ending.