Book Club

BOOK OF THE WEEK with Charlie Richards. Make Me: (Jack Reacher 20), Lee Child, ISBN 978-80857502681 (Bantam) BD4.500 for Gulf Weekly Book Club members

Jack Reacher has no place to go, and all the time in the world to get there, so a remote railroad stop on the prairie with the curious name of Mother’s Rest seems perfect for an aimless one-day stopover.

He expects to find a lonely pioneer tombstone in a sea of nearly-ripe wheat ... but instead there is a woman waiting for a missing colleague, a cryptic note about 200 deaths and a small town full of silent, watchful people.

Reacher’s one-day stopover turns into an open-ended quest leading to the most hidden reaches of the internet and right into the nightmare heart of darkness.

READ IT NOW IN PAPERBACK
Warriors of the Storm, Bernard Cornwell, ISBN 978-0007504091 (Harper) BD4.500 for Gulf Weekly Book Club members

The new novel is Bernard Cornwell’s Number One bestselling series on the making of England and the fate of his great hero, Uhtred of Bebbanburg.

A major TV show The Last Kingdom is based on the first two books in the series.

A fragile peace is about to be broken. King Alfred’s son Edward and formidable daughter, Æthelflaed, rule Wessex, Mercia and East Anglia. But all around the restless Northmen, eyeing the rich lands and wealthy churches, are mounting raids.

Uhtred of Bebbanburg, the kingdoms’ greatest warrior, controls northern Mercia from the strongly-fortified city of Chester. But forces are rising up against him.

Northmen allied to the Irish, led by the fierce warrior Ragnall Ivarson, are soon joined by the Northumbrians and their strength could prove overwhelming.

Despite the gathering threat, both Edward and Æthelflaed are reluctant to move out of the safety of their fortifications. But with Uhtred’s own daughter married to Ivarson’s brother, who can be trusted?

In the struggle between family and loyalty, between personal ambition and political commitment, there will be no easy path. But a man with a warrior’s courage may be able to find it. Such a man is Uhtred … and this may be his finest hour.

My favourite read of the week
The Road to Little Drippling: More Notes From a Small Island, Bill Bryson, ISBN 978-0552779838 (Black Swan) BD5 for Gulf Weekly Book Club members

Twenty years ago, Bill Bryson went on a trip around Britain to celebrate the green and kindly island that had become his adopted country.

The hilarious book that resulted, Notes from a Small Island, was taken to the nation’s heart and became the bestselling travel book ever, and was also voted in a BBC poll the book that best that represents Britain.

Now, to mark the 20th anniversary of that modern classic, Bryson makes a brand-new journey round Britain to see what has changed.

Following (but not too closely) a route he dubs the Bryson Line, from Bognor Regis to Cape Wrath, by way of places that many people never get to at all, Bryson sets out to rediscover the wondrously beautiful, magnificently eccentric, endearingly unique country that he thought he knew but doesn’t altogether recognise any more.

Yet, despite Britain’s occasional failings and more or less eternal bewilderments, Bryson is still pleased to call the rainy island ‘home’. And not just because of the cream teas, a noble history and an extra day off at Christmas.

Once again, with his matchless homing instinct for the funniest and quirkiest, his unerring eye for the idiotic, the endearing, the ridiculous and the scandalous, Bryson gives us an acute and perceptive insight into all that is best and worst about Britain today.