EIGHT MONTHS ON GHAZZAH STREET: Hilary Mantel

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so plausibly rendered that we never feel we're reading dire jingoist or racist fantasies. Still, the unmistakable correspondences between the two novels do, at moments, suggest the less than sympathetic travel writing of Paul Theroux, The development of this mystery and its denouement are not the most effective pieces of the novel. The frustration and futility of trying to fi Keep the young lady sober," the businessman advised. "She's got the customs to face, and it's her first time. They go through everything," he told her. "I hope you haven't got anything in your suitcase that you shouldn't have?" 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.'' 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".

The apartment building on Ghazzah Street offers some diversion -- and some mystery, as there are sounds coming from a supposedly empty apartment. I lived in the kingdom for four years. My first published novel was completed in a dark apartment in downtown Jidda. I wrote my second in a small expatriate compound, in an ageing prefabricated house where rats bounced and scurried in the roof. I had met my Muslim neighbours; women in seclusion speak, sometimes, with a freedom their men don't possess. I knew I was privileged. I did not believe anything I read in the papers. I did not believe much I was told, but I wrote it down all the same. Out of my notes I planned to make a novel, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street. But I couldn't begin writing it until I had left the kingdom behind me for good. an aura of lurking menace, not to mention the tantalizing riddle of the strange sounds that emanate from the supposedly vacant apartment above the Shores' temporary quarters. comforting notion that the world can be neatly divided into ''Good Souls and Sad Cases.'' But gradually we come to realize how deeply this seemingly solid foundation has been undermined by the shattering experiencesdead after an all-night party; nurse's father, dogged ex-policeman, off out there to get at the truth. And then the inquests, and the coroner's reports, and the hints of diplomatic cover-ups, and skulduggery in high places; the We could be in and out within three years," he said. "Your salary is paid in riyals, tax-free. All you need out of it is your day-to-day living expenses and you can bank the rest where you like, in any currency you like. Turadup are offering Enjoy it, gentlemen," the steward said. The woman held up her coffee cup. He swayed toward her with the pot. "Nondairy creamer, madam?" Mantel’s reputation was further enhanced with the publication of the novel A Place of Greater Safety (1992), a richly detailed chronicle of the French Revolution as seen through the eyes of three of its central participants. She drew on her years in Botswana to write the novel A Change of Climate (1994), about British missionaries in South Africa, and on her own straitened adolescence for the clear-eyed coming-of-age novel An Experiment in Love (1995). Three years later she returned to historical fiction with The Giant, O’Brien, which imaginatively explores and contrasts the lives of two real 18th-century figures—a freakishly tall sideshow performer steeped in the Irish oral tradition and a Scottish surgeon in thrall to modern science. Mantel writes with a jaunty, wry panache and a scientific precision that can capture a character or a mood and offer it up, impaled and squirming, like a bug on a pin." - Francine Prose, The New York Times Book Review

and disasters are so plausibly rendered that we never feel we're reading dire jingoist or racist fantasies. Still, the unmistakable correspondences between the two novels do, at moments, suggest the less than sympathetic travel 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. His companion dug his plastic fork into a mille-feuille, and made no reply. "How long now?" he asked after a while. She studied Law at the London School of Economics and Sheffield University. She was employed as a social worker, and lived in Botswana for five years, followed by four years in Saudi Arabia, before returning to Britain in the mid-1980s. In 1987 she was awarded the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for an article about Jeddah, and she was film critic for The Spectator from 1987 to 1991. Her novels include Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988), set in Jeddah; Fludd (1989), set in a mill village in the north of England and winner of the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, the Cheltenham Prize and the Southern Arts Literature Prize; A Place of Greater Safety (1992), an epic account of the events of the French revolution that won the Sunday Express Book of the Year award; A Change of Climate (1994), the story of a missionary couple whose lives are torn apart by the loss of their child; and An Experiment in Love (1995), about the events in the lives of three schoolfriends from the north of England who arrive at London University in 1970, winner of the 1996 Hawthornden Prize. The Giant, O'Brien (1998) tells the story of Charles O'Brien who leaves his home in Ireland to make his fortune as a sideshow attraction in London.The reason Saudi Arabia is tolerated in the international community is that it is wealthy and produces a vital commodity.