Beirut - Explosive Thrills At TwitBookClub

Dubai's Twitter Book Club - or @TwitBookClub as it's fondly known - is a regular gathering of book reading types enabled by that most real time of fun technologies, Twitter.

They normally meet at Wild Peeta (the famously social shawarma joint) at Dubai World Trade Centre, but that's temporarily out of order so this Saturday will see them meeting at Café Nero DWTC instead (at 11am, as you asked). The TwitBookClub website is linked here.

This'll be the first book club outing for Beirut, and should be interesting. It was certainly an eye opener talking to book clubs about Olives last year, readers' perspectives are a wonderful thing indeed to encounter. You find people question motives, examine reactions and generally go about prodding and tweaking your work in ways you simply wouldn't have thought possible. Beirut, being quite a badly behaved book, will probably respond to a tweak with a hefty kick in the groin, but let's see...

I have generally gone much easier on promoting Beirut than I did with Olives (if you're a regular, you will no doubt have noticed and possibly even been appreciative), which has had the direct  impact of a lower uptake - noise begets noise, so a softly softly approach has really meant little conversation around the book, fewer reviews and so on. This, one suspects, might be about to change.

In the meantime, do feel free to buy and speedread Beirut - An Explosive Thriller in time for this Saturday's meeting (it's in all good UAE bookshops as well as available from Amazon, iBooks et al) or, if you've read the book and you'd like to complain or apply for a refund, I'll be at Café Nero on Saturday facing a branch loaded with Tweeters!!!