which seemed to surround him, like an aura: an aura of forbearance, of self-control. His patience was not like other people's, a rather feeble virtue, which had, by its nature, to be its own reward; it was a virtue like a strong magnet,

My last house was outside the city. I felt less scrutinised, more desolate. I remember the hostile sunshine, the barren line of hills, the absence of birdsong and the distant line of the freeway: the tiny, silent cars moving from somewhere to somewhere, leaving me behind with my journal. Melbourne, I think. He keeps a place in the Cotswolds though. He's been with Turadup for twenty years. He's a shareholder. Pollard says he's a millionaire. Anyway, he seems very enthusiastic about this building. About the whole scene in Jeddah. He says it's a very stimulating place to work if you're in the construction business." He paused. "I'll tell you what he said exactly." It was a damn funny business, if you ask me. That Dr. Arnott, the chap that lived in the flat she fell out of … and that wife of his, Penny wasn't it … and the British Embassy? You can't tell me it wasn't a cover-up."Pollard did say—" He looked at her in slight anxiety. "He said that his only reservation was how you'd settle in. As you've been a working woman."

Left alone, she closed her eyes. She was apprehensive, yes. She turned over the steward's comment in her mind, because she was not one to let flippancies go unexamined; it paid to examine them, as there was so little, she always thought, in what An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.believed him, but did not feel herself a better person for the belief. She had been round and about southern Africa for five years, in regions where, by and large, the possibilities of corruption had not been fully explored. Andrew thought Soon the unease occasioned by Frances' physical surroundings pales beside her horror at the smarmy racism of the European community and her growing alarm over the severity with which her sex is curtailing her human rights. In her 20s, her health was damaged in a sequence of medical bungles, as doctors tried without success to pinpoint the source of her ever-widening pain. Eventually, she herself diagnosed the gynaecological condition endometriosis. After treatment, "I was missing a few bits" - including womb, ovaries and "a few lengths of bowel". Giving Up the Ghost contains many moving passages about the phantom daughter whom she and her husband, a retired geologist, planned to name Catriona, after Catriona Drummond, the girl Davie falls in love with in Stevenson's sequel to Kidnapped. At one point it dawned on her that, with two homes, comprising seven bedrooms and cupboards replete with freshly laundered linen, she was keeping house for "the unborn". road without attracting the obscene romantic attentions of cruising motorists. As she becomes reluctantly acculturated, the onion that the narrative peels apart is not the flimsily built new city but the private dramas of oppression, absurdity