Frances is baffled by their acceptance of what she considers intolerable and tries to understand it. I had a very good time talking with the women, and learned a great deal from them (without having to deal with flirting, football scores, or dirty jokes). 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.

Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988) — a serendipitous find at the library — is in the same vein, with the added frisson of having been written in the aftermath of Mantel’s own unhappy sojourn in Saudi Arabia.The only thing that ever results from this childish, arrogant attitude is animosity and, sometimes, real harm. At once a riveting thriller and a subtle political tale, set in a place as harsh and unforgiving as the desert.

But in the dim, airless flat, Frances spends lonely days writing in her diary, hearing the sounds of sobs through the pipes from the floor above, and seeing the flitting shadows of men on the stairwell. When she sees a strange presence in the apartment block’s stairwell, she’s convinced that something illegal is going on, but no one, including her husband, believes her when she voices her concerns. spines of scaffolding, the sheets of plate glass; then last of all the marble, the most popular facing material, held on to the plain walls behind it with some sort of adhesive. He leaned over them; his face, pale and seamy under the late-night lights, showed a kind of patient disgust. There was a main road to negotiate, but it was mid-morning, fairly quiet, and she never had any trouble crossing at the lights.Andrew, a civil engineer, and Frances met and married in Africa but come to Jeddah- -a place of blinding heat, ugly buildings, and underlying menace- -when Andrew accepts a job with an international construction company. Yasmin and her wheeler-dealer husband Raji are from Pakistan, and there’s a Saudi couple: Samira and her elusive husband Abdul Nasr. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. As she stepped out from the kerb, he revved his engine, the car sprang forward, and she had to leap from under its wheels.

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. It had not escaped her notice that women were always using men's Christian names, but that men only did it when there was something in the offing: a rebuke, a plea. I managed to get myself one of the original prints by Penguin which I enjoyed for its vintage look and small size. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2016-08-28 14:45:32 Audio_codec mp3 Audio_sample_rate 128000 Bad_audio false Identifier BBC_Radio_4_Extra_20160828_133000_Hilary_Mantel__Eight_Months_on_Ghazzah_Street Next BBC_Radio_4_Extra_20160828_144500_Short_Stories_by_John_Mortimer Previous BBC_Radio_4_Extra_20160828_131500_A_Dark_History_of_British_Gardening Run time 01:15:00 Scandate 20160828133000 Scanner Internet Archive Python library 1.I loved Mantel’s memoir Giving Up The Ghost and I have Wolf Hall to read but you’ve just gone and made me want to read this book first – right now, in fact. It turned out to be a superb, insidiously creepy read, the kind of story that gets under the skin and has you throwing glances over your shoulder to make sure no one’s watching you. Mantel was the winner of the Hawthornden Prize, and her reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books. 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. It tells the story of an Englishwoman, Frances Shore, who moves to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia to live with her husband, an engineer.

With marvelously understated wit, Mantel chronicles a world of teas and dinner parties that eventually coalesce into a sinister story of horror just beyond a veil. She begins a diary recording her impressions; makes friends with Yasmin and Samira, two young married Islamic women on the block; and wonders about the supposedly empty apartment above hers and Andrew's, from which she's certain that she's heard sobbing. 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? She keeps her doubts to herself, for example, when she is told that hand amputations are done humanely, with a doctor there to prevent infection.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. Both novels have a kind of defiant toughness that's especially striking when one reads them together. And by the time you get out to Jeddah, we'll be fixed up with a house, and everything will be ready for you. Frances is unable to map either the ever changing landscape or the Kingdom's heavily veiled ways of working.