EIGHT MONTHS ON GHAZZAH STREET: Hilary Mantel

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so plausibly rendered that we never feel we're reading dire jingoist or racist fantasies. Still, the unmistakable correspondences between the two novels do, at moments, suggest the less than sympathetic travel writing of Paul Theroux, Instead of celebrating the mystical side of "sensitives," the people who travel England's contemporary psychic "fayre" circuit, Mantel (A Change of Continue reading » pleasures of moral censure, the frisson of violent death in faraway places. The press reports had left an image in people's minds: of lazy, glitzy, transient lives, of hard liquor and easy money, of amoral people turned scared and We're relinquishing this route next year," he said. "Give it to British Caledonian and welcome, that's what I say. No more to drink then?" He prepared to abandon her, move away. Sleeping executives stirred

It took me some time to read this horrifying novel by Hilary Mantel, not because it isn't well-written or compelling, but because often it's simply so painful to read. There is a mystery, a shadowy bit of skulduggery that gathers force toward the end, but the impact of the book is not in this artifice but in the portrayal of life in Saudi Arabia based on the author's own experience of living there. Henry VIII's challenge to the church's power with his desire to divorce his queen and marry Anne Boleyn set off a tidal wave of religious, political and societal turmoil that Continue reading » Hi Samantha! Yes, this would make a great book group book as there’s so much to discuss here. Frances really can’t under the women who live behind the veil, and yet the women who wear the veil actually like wearing it. That, in itself, would make a great discussion. It became clear upon reading this that Frances was imposing her Western views on these women, and yet these women were trying to impose their eastern views on her. I think you’re right. I read that a little while ago, but it didn’t ring a bell until now you mention it:)Not long into their stay Andrew tells her about a psychiatrist’s study on the stress on immigrant workers, and you know his words are going to be prophetic:

Well, it can't be such a grand life, because he's just signed up with Turadup himself. He's going to manage their Jeddah business; he's had experience out there, of course."to consider any of this at all, and simply to enjoy Hilary Mantel's smart, astringent and marvelously upsetting fiction. I lived in the kingdom for four years. My first published novel was completed in a dark apartment in downtown Jidda. I wrote my second in a small expatriate compound, in an ageing prefabricated house where rats bounced and scurried in the roof. I had met my Muslim neighbours; women in seclusion speak, sometimes, with a freedom their men don't possess. I knew I was privileged. I did not believe anything I read in the papers. I did not believe much I was told, but I wrote it down all the same. Out of my notes I planned to make a novel, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street. But I couldn't begin writing it until I had left the kingdom behind me for good. received each day a used opinion from him, just as she received a shirt for laundering, tainted with the smell of smoked bacon and ripe cheese.'' She's also capable of being bracingly nasty, as in this description of expatriates