EIGHT MONTHS ON GHAZZAH STREET: Hilary Mantel

Product Information

For him, it’s not just about the money he can make in Saudi Arabia: he’s fallen in love with the architecture of the building he’s contracted to construct. Drinks were free of course, but on the Saudi run this standard airline ploy had the status of charity work. The date is 2 Muharram, by the Hijra calendar, and the evening temperature is 88°F; the year is 1405. Even when you've been coming in and out for years, you never know what they're going to be looking for.

They had run into him once before, in Lusaka, and not liked him particularly; but now Pollard was offering a job, and Andrew needed one.The reader sees immediately that this will not be a good situation for Frances when her husband, who had arrived earlier, locks her into the apartment her first day there, for her own protection.

The flat directly above Frances and Andrew is supposedly empty, but Frances hears sounds of life there. Yet, almost immediately following this exchange, Fairfax shows Frances a photo of his wife, who he describes as a "giantess," a woman who married him only because she could walk down the aisle in high heels rather than "shuffling up the aisle in gym shoes and bending her knees. So, torn between her habitual openness to new cultures and exposing a horror that people didn’t know about, Mantel wrote it. The details were fixed up, at the President Hotel this time (there being, in Gaborone, a choice of two) over a tough T-bone steak and a glass of Lion lager. I visited Riyadh briefly on a reporting trip at about the same period Mantel describes -- when the bloom of the oil gold rush was fading and the Kingdom was forced into budget cuts that led to many grand building projects being abandoned.Andrew, a civil engineer, is there to make a lot of money by working on the construction of a new Ministry Building. This much is true; there is a plenitude of the little blighters; a tide of winky faces bereft of their smiles. And then the inquests, and the coroner's reports, and the hints of diplomatic cover-ups, and skulduggery in high places; the pleasures of moral censure, the frisson of violent death in faraway places.

Shunning the expatriate housing compound, the Shores move into a grim four-flat building on Ghazzah Street. So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. He is then offered a post in Saudi Arabia with a firm building, amongst other things, a new government ministry building. She sees men with rifles in the streets outside and is sure Yasmin and Samira are lying to her—suspicions that prove horrifyingly right when a British guest of theirs is murdered, Yasmin's husband is shot, and Frances's neighbors turn out to have bloody secrets of their own.Eight Months on Ghazzah Street centers on the Shores -- Andrew, an engineer who came for the money to be made there, and his wife, Frances, who joins him. He said, ‘I have witnessed the biggest transportation of ready-mixed concrete in the history of the human race. In the kitchen their housemaid, Elizabeth, was washing glasses—pointless really as they would soon be crated up—and they could hear the separate clink that each one made as she put it down on the drain board. on Ghazzah Street'' and ''A Change of Climate,'' two witty, disturbing and memorable novels by Hilary Mantel. This friend of mine went into a pharmacy for a drop of penicillin, he was planning, you know, on being a bit naughty that night, and he believed in dosing himself first; and he came out, and no bloody wheels.