The expats tell each other, as they are told, that they must respect the cultural differences of the host country. 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. Rumours circulate throughout the expat community of the terrible things that have befallen other Western women who have gone out inappropriately dressed or been found in the company of a man they weren’t married to.

I don't know why Mantel devised a central character who was so unsympathetic, and I hesitate to think that Mantel herself saw anything admirable in Frances Shore. Entre el gótico más sofocante y claustrofóbico, y el thriller de lo más actual, a pesar de que es una novela de 1988, en esta su tercera obra, Hilary Mantel retrata con maestria los intentos de una mujer occidental por encajar de alguna forma en la sociedad saudí ya que se ve obligada a vivir alli durante un tiempo debido al trabajo de su marido. A large part of the pleasure of reading the book is the virtuosity with which she controls the crescendo. She has only constantly changing rumours to hang on to, and no one with whom to share her creeping unease. Reviewing the book in The Spectator, Anita Brookner wrote of a "tightness of control" and commented that a "peculiar fear emanates from this narrative".

There is also, at the end, a short chapter of first-person narration (I won’t say by who) which, while not jarring, seemed somewhat gratuitous. She is then told that in fact the flat is used by a junior member of the royal family for illicit trysts, but she comes to suspect that is simply a tale put out to satisfy a foreigner's curiosity. As Frances listens to her friend “explain” Islam and the ways of Islamic women, she has food for thought at last, but not in the way she expected. She brings her considerable literary gifts to bear in a fictional account of her stay that makes you understand why. The portrayal of this culture in Mantel's novel is enough to turn the biggest fan of multiculturalism into a raving advocate for the mission civilatrice of the West.

Instead, she simply wallows in self-pity and largely self-imposed isolation from her first day in Saudi Arabia. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year.Mantel describes the difficulties of being a women in Saudi, not just being able to carry along with 'normal' activities but actually almost becoming invisible and irrelevant in society. The frustration and futility of trying to find out exactly how the tragedy unfolds is more poignant than the actual events. She’s an experienced expatriate, and yet she seems spooked before she even gets off the plane in Saudi.

It may have been poor editing; perhaps at some point the book was going to be written in the present and when it was reworked, some stuff got by. Description: Nearly 30 years on from its original publication, Hilary Mantel's third novel is still as disturbing, incisive and illuminating as ever.Cut to eight or nine months earlier (in a book entitled Eight Months on Gazzah Street, the street where Andrew and Frances live) and you’re immediately plunged into a state of dread which Mantel develops masterfully. I read this book with a mounting sense of dread, all the more appropriate in the light of recent events in the Saudi Arabian consulate in Turkey. 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. For her novel, Mantel has embellished her miserable experience with a sinister mystery concerning a supposedly unoccupied flat in the gloomy building where Frances Shore lives with her husband, a contractor employed by the Saudi government.