Book of the month for December

You have heard about Superman, Spiderman and other superheroes, but do you know who Ajaaj is?!! Ajaaj is UAE superhero, a mysterious sandstorm that can morph into a young Emirati man with superpowers to build a wall or even a bridge. He is a legend from the past that protects the future. The year is 2020, and Dubai is a powerful economic city. An evil man is trying to take down and destroy Dubai, but Ajaaj keeps on stopping his plans. Then he starts manipulating media, through his news channel, by showing UAE people that, Ajaaj the sandstorm is creating all of these disasters. Everyone is affected by the media, everyone except Shamma and Humaid, who have seen Ajaaj in action and know that he was defending and not destroying. The conflict between Ajaaj and the evil man comes to culmination in volume 6, when Ajaaj sacrifices himself for the Emirati people, by using his strength to fight an ocean storm. Will he lose his powers?!! Will he die?!! Don’t forget that legends don’t die. The late Shaikh Zayed once said: “Who doesn’t have a past won’t have a future”. Ajaaj is a comic book that joins the past, the present, and the future. It also shows how easily people are affected by the news and the media around them. Published by Watani in 7 volumes and available in both Arabic and English

Review by Amal Al Sharqi, recommended by Sharjah Colleges
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Book of the month for November

Linda Davies is a prolific writer of thrillers, tales of espionage and stories revolving around the world of financial intrigue, but recently she has dabbled in the world of children’s fiction. “Sea Djinn” is her latest offering, and in Harry Potteresque style, Davies weaves an adventurous tale involving mythical sea lords and modern day Dubai.
The story involves three teenage heroes. Finn Kennedy comes to live with his cousin Georgie in Dubai after his parents disappear at sea. One night while star gazing on a Dubai beach, he meets Triton the sea djinn, a supernatural being with spectacular powers. Triton reveals he knows the true whereabouts of Finn’s parents. They have been held captive in the fantastical underwater world of the evil Hydrus, also a sea djinn. Triton enlists Finn’s help to wage war against the evil sea djinn and his dark kingdom.
Finn and Georgie, along with their new found friend Fred, are trained by Mr Violet, a Light Fighter. He is a teacher at Finn’s school who has been strategically placed there along with a few others by Triton. Together they train their magical powers to fight the fight of their lives.
This is a brilliant and original tale of good versus evil with many surprises along the way. It is set in the all too familiar back drop of Jumeirah Beach which makes it a special read for long time and the not so long time residents of the UAE.
Of real note is the fact that Linda Davies herself has survived a kidnapping at sea by the Iranian army. She drew heavily from this experience to encapsulate the terror experienced by Finn’s parents in the novel.

~Review by Helen Weston recommended by Abu Dhabi Men's College
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Book of the month for October

There has been a lot of debate lately about the legitimacy of fiction depicting history Half of a Yellow Sun, is one such story which compels readers to ‘feel’ the facts of the Nigeria–Biafra war from 1967-70. This intimate and powerful, yet delicate novel focuses on the individual’s thoughts and emotions, the subtleties of human relationships and the psychological legacies of colonialism.
The characters who deliver the story are: a young privileged middle-class Igbo woman, Olanna, a young servant village boy, Ugwu, and Richard, an English university lecturer. All are caught up in the unfolding political events of this time. The three main characters lives all intersect where they have to question their own responses to the vicious civil war that claimed more than two million lives (including the grandfathers of the writer among the many thousands of civilians dead).
Adichie’s father was Nigeria’s first university professor of statistics and the book's character of Richard is based on him.& The book opens with the young servant who longs to please the university lecturer to the point of ironing his socks - a domestic chore which goes horribly wrong resulting in the burning of the items. The lecturer recognizes that Ugwu is clever and deserves an education for which he is prepared to pay. A charming, lasting relationship is about to begin.
The backdrop of war does not overshadow the development of her characters with a detailed sketch of Nigeria as place: cashew trees, mangoes, mud walls, nouveau riche ostentation.
Adichie’s characters are disadvantaged by being themselves. She ingeniously uses their failings as a way of establishing a narrative tension and of creating comedy. Ugwu does not know enough; Olanna, beautiful and educated knows too much. These very different viewpoints puts the reader in the unique position of being able to see the effects of war on various levels of society. It is through this fictional account of such a war the reader can investigate the moral responsibility about the end of colonialism, about ethnic allegiances, about class and race and about the ways in which love can complicate all of these matters.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 29, won the 2007 Orange prize for fiction with this book. Adichie is a graduate of the African Studies program at Yale University. She does believe there is a long way to go before the new Nigerian novel can change the literary landscape of an impoverished country where bookshops are relatively few. Her novel has been the talk of middle-aged Nigerians and one such man described how the book had moved his wife to talk to him about her traumatic experiences four decades ago.
~Review by Melanie Pearson recommended by Dubai Women's College
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Book of the month for September

Christopher Boone, the autistic 15-year-old narrator of this revelatory novel, relaxes by groaning and doing math problems in his head, eats red-but not yellow or brown-foods and screams when he is touched. Strange as he may seem, other people are far more of a conundrum to him, for he lacks the intuitive "theory of mind" by which most of us sense what's going on in other people's heads. When his neighbor's poodle is killed and Christopher is falsely accused of the crime, he decides that he will take a page from Sherlock Holmes (one of his favorite characters) and track down the killer. As the mystery leads him to the secrets of his parents' broken marriage and then into an odyssey to find his place in the world, he must fall back on deductive logic to navigate the emotional complexities of a social world that remains a closed book to him. In the hands of first-time novelist Haddon, Christopher is a fascinating case study and, above all, a sympathetic boy: not closed off, as the stereotype would have it, but too open-overwhelmed by sensations, bereft of the filters through which normal people screen their surroundings. Christopher can only make sense of the chaos of stimuli by imposing arbitrary patterns ("4 yellow cars in a row made it a Black Day, which is a day when I don't speak to anyone and sit on my own reading books and don't eat my lunch and Take No Risks"). His literal-minded observations make for a kind of poetic sensibility and a poignant evocation of character. Though Christopher insists, "This will not be a funny book. I cannot tell jokes because I do not understand them," the novel brims with touching, ironic humor. The result is an eye-opening work in a unique and compelling literary voice.
~ Publishers Weekly
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Book of the month for May

After 103 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and with four million copies of The Kite Runner shipped, Khaled Hosseini returns with a beautiful, riveting, and haunting novel that confirms his place as one of the most important literary writers today.

Propelled by the same superb instinct for storytelling that made The Kite Runner a beloved classic, A Thousand Splendid Suns is at once an incredible chronicle of thirty years of Afghan history and a deeply moving story of family, friendship, faith, and the salvation to be found in love.

Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss and by fate. As they endure the ever escalating dangers around them — in their home as well as in the streets of Kabul — they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation. With heart-wrenching power and suspense, Hosseini shows how a woman's love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to survival.

A stunning accomplishment, A Thousand Splendid Suns is a haunting, heartbreaking, compelling story of an unforgiving time, an unlikely friendship, and an indestructible love.

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