I don't really know." During those phone calls (direct dial, good clear line) she'd not inquired of Andrew, Are you happy? It would have meant another expensive silence, because he did not deal in that sort of question. He'd have found Well no, actually, we lived in a much smaller place. We used to go up to Gaborone for a bit of excitement." The story is slow-paced, the main character is annoyingly sanctimonious - oh, and there's also no plot to speak of. Apart from that, it's fine! I haven’t read Wolf Hall, but I’d be delighted if she won the Booker, if only to recognise her brilliant writing career. But you're a woman," the steward said. "You're a woman, aren't you? You're not a person anymore." Doggedly, courteously, as if their conversation had never occurred, he reached for a glass from his trolley: "Would you like champagne?"

The most engaging moments in Mantel's intriguing new novel occur when the uneducated Irish characters who make up the loutish retinue of ""the Giant, O'Brien"" converse. Perfectly imagining the Continue reading » 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."

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scene. When the Jidda earthquake comes -- and it will come -- all-seeing Allah will observe that the buildings are held together with glue; and he will peel the city apart like an onion.'' 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:

I didn’t know either. Apparently she’s been a full time writer since the 1980s, so I’m assuming that in that period she would have travelled with her husband:) Well, I take your word for it. But still, what a hole it is, Gaborone. Bunch of tarts sitting in the dust outside selling woolly hats. Sit by the pool, play the fruit machines, bugger all else to do." He paused, the tirade halted by a scrupleI think Hilary Mantel is one of the best British writers of my generation. I’ve read all her books, and they are all wonderfully well written, and as you say, so diverse in subject matter. 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." Andrew's letters had been short, practical. They told her to bring flat sandals, British postage stamps, a bottle of Bovril. His voice on the phone had been hesitant. There had been the odd, expensive silence. He didn't know how to describe http://bbcmedia.ic.llnwd.net/stream/bbcmedia_radio4extra_mf_p Start_localtime 2016-08-28 14:30:00 Start_time 2016-08-28 13:30:00 Stop_time 2016-08-28 14:45:00 Utc_offset 100 Year But why?’ she insisted. She felt on the verge of tears. ‘I just wanted to cross. I would have waited. I would have let him go by.’

Rees, Jasper (8 October 2009). "Hilary Mantel: health or the Man Booker Prize? I'd take health". The Telegraph . Retrieved 30 July 2011. down from the terrace and out into the street. Across the road, the nation's only cinema was showing a double bill: a kung fu drama, and Mary Poppins. Andrew stood in the dusty thoroughfare known as the Mall, gazing into the window I don't think so." They had already eaten; dinner, she supposed. So much smoked salmon is consumed on aircraft that it is a wonder there is any left to eat at ground level. The steward had just now whisked her tray from under her nose. "You could give me some brandy," she said. Mantel's depiction of the mortal threat of living in a country that has no rule of law is devastatingly realistic. Her biting and brutal humor seems at time like satire -- except there's no exaggeration involved. The Pakistani neighbor of the protagonist, Frances Shore, tries to reassure her by explaining that they don't really stone adulteresses any more -- they throw a few token stones then shoot her. "I was so relieved," Frances wrote mordantly in her diary. The British expats discuss some of the more famous customs of the country, like cutting off the hands of thieves, by noting in passing that they use anesthetic and have doctors standing by to bind up the wound. you an open mind, and discretion, and common sense; if you have those with you, you can manage anywhere. I make large claims for myself, she thought. She pushed up the window shade and looked out, into featureless darkness. There was noWe thought that her isolation and how insular she became was interesting. The atmosphere that was created. Quite a poetic style at times.

Frances does hate it. She hates the greed which brings the expats to endure the intolerable in return for generous salaries. (She and her husband Andrew are mustering a deposit for a house in the UK). She hates the vacuous lifestyle of endless shopping and nostalgic British ‘cultural’ activities. She has nothing to do, and apart from (illegal) boozy parties with the other expats and the shopping, she is confined to her flat because it’s not just the official decrees that restrict her, it’s also the constant sense of feeling unsafe because of unofficial ad hoc harassments: Mantel paints the varied expat communities (and the ugly corporations that do business there) very well, her opprobrium doled out equally to natives and foreigners alike.He was hovering, waiting to tell her some horror stories. There were always stories out of the Middle East, and no doubt Jeff Pollard would have told her some, if he had not been so anxious to recruit Andrew for his building project. But her tone wrapped up the conversation. "Sure on that brandy?" the steward said; and moved away. The slightest encouragement, and he would have asked, "Do you remember that Helen Smith case?" 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. Andrew Shore shook hands with Eric Parsons, the Saudi man; Jeff Pollard, talking, conducted him down from the terrace and out into the street. Across the road, the nation's only cinema was showing a double bill: a kung fu drama, and Mary Poppins. Andrew stood in the dusty thoroughfare known as the Mall, gazing into the window of the President Hotel's gift shop: crocodile handbags, skin rugs, complete bushmen kits with arrows and ostrich shells, direct from the small factory in Palapye which had recently started turning them out. "I can hardly believe I'm finished in Africa," he said. Frances closed her eyes again. Drifting, she caught bits of their conversation: jargon, catchphrases. At home, at her widowed mother's house in York, she had been reading books about her destination. Despite her skepticism, her better knowledge, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street is also a very funny dark comedy of manners." - Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books Eight Months was first published in 1986, pre- Wolf Hall, and is a reflection of the few years that Mantel spent living in Saudi Arabia. I mention this to give some context to some later comments! As always, feel free to comment below, and get involved.