EIGHT MONTHS ON GHAZZAH STREET: Hilary Mantel

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Andrew was silent. He passed them, one by one. Why, really, should she share his vision of their future? She had come to Africa at her own behest, a single woman, one of the few recruited for her line of work. She had lived alone before they met; for that, once, someone might have offered him a bribe; but through the other party's ineptitude and poor English, and Andrew's naivete, the occasion had passed without profit. Home » England » Hilary Mantel » Eight Months on Ghazzah Street Hilary Mantel: Eight Months on Ghazzah Street

A part of her, now, thought the persistence of the image sinister; a part of her said, things happen everywhere, and after all, she said, comforting herself, there's only the world. Travel ends and routine begins and old habits which you thought Though all Mantel's novels illumine societal evils -- be it the British class system in An Experiment in Love, the malevolent interplay between personality and public events in A Place of Greater Safety or colonialism in A Change of Climate -- Eight Months on Ghazzah Street is perhaps Mantel's most overtly political work. Her outrage against a society that virtually imprisons women, mutilates thieves, stones adulterers and disappears over-curious intruders is palpable." - Charlotte Innes, The Los Angeles Times Two to get you started?" Hand hovering over the trolley, he seemed to approve her choice; as if what lay ahead were something to brace yourself for, not to celebrate.

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

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. With not much else to do, Frances befriends the Muslim women living in the building and finds herself unable to come to terms with the religious and cultural differences between them. She finds a similar discord with the expatriate community in which she is expected to socialise.

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pleasures of moral censure, the frisson of violent death in faraway places. The press reports had left an image in people's minds: of lazy, glitzy, transient lives, of hard liquor and easy money, of amoral people turned scared and 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. From a distance it lends a spurious air of antiquity to the