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Eight Months on Ghazzah Street
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Synopsis
Eight Months on Ghazzah Street by Hilary Mantel
Mantel's prescient and haunting novel of life in Saudi Arabia. 'Horrifyingly gripping. It urges the reader to suspend normal life entirely until the book is read.' Grace Ingoldby, Sunday Times Frances Shore is a cartographer by trade, a maker of maps, but when her husband's work takes her to Saudi Arabia she finds herself unable to map the Kingdom's areas of internal darkness. The regime is corrupt and harsh, the expatriates are hard-drinking money-grubbers, and her Muslim neighbours are secretive, watchful. The streets are not a woman's territory; confined in her flat, she finds her sense of self begin to dissolve. She hears whispers, sounds of distress from the 'empty' flat above her head. She has only rumours, no facts to hang on to, and no one with whom to share her creeping unease. As her days empty of certainty and purpose, her life becomes a blank -- waiting to be filled by violence and disaster.
Comparison: Julie Myerson, A M Homes, Rachel Cusk
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Reviews
'A peculiar fear emanates from this narrative: I dread to think what it did to the writer herself.'
Anita Brookner, Spectator
'A Middle Eastern Turn of the Screw with an insidious power to grip.'
Robert Irwin, Time Out
'A memorably appalled and hellishly funny novel.'
Christopher Wordsworth, Guardian
'A stunning Orwellian nightmare.'
Literary Review
About the Author
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Hilary Mantel was born in northern Derbyshire in 1952. She was educated at a convent school in Cheshire and went on to the LSE and Sheffield University, where she studied law. After university she was briefly a social worker in a geriatric hospital, and much later used her experiences in her novels Every Day is Mother's Day and Vacant Possession. In 1977 she went to live in Botswana with her husband, then a geologist. In 1982 they moved on to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, where she would set her third novel, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street.
Her first novel was published in 1985, and she returned to the UK the following year. In 1987 she was awarded the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for travel writing, and became the film critic of the Spectator. Her fourth novel, Fludd, was awarded the Cheltenham Festival Prize, the Southern Arts Literature Prize, and the Winifred Holtby Prize. Her fifth novel, A Place of Greater Safety, won the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award.
A Change of Climate, published in 1993, is the story of an East Anglian family, former missionaries, torn apart by conflicts generated in Southern Africa in the early years of Apartheid. An Experiment in Love published in 1995, is a story about childhood and university life, set in London in 1970. It was awarded the Hawthornden Prize.
Beyond Black, published in 2005, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, while her most recent novel, Wolf Hall, won the 2009 Booker Prize.
Photograph © Jane Bown
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