EIGHT MONTHS ON GHAZZAH STREET: Hilary Mantel

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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 A violent conspiracy tale with a nuanced psychological portrait of a woman learning to trust her own eyes and ears.” — Entertainment Weekly The development of this mystery and its denouement are not the most effective pieces of the novel. The frustration and futility of trying to find out exactly how the tragedy unfolds is more poignant than the actual events. In fact, this gothic part of the story is almost a subplot, or a symbol for the much more mundane corruption that is portrayed throughout the novel. Saudi Arabian manager, a man called Eric Parsons, was in Johannesburg trawling for expertise. And on that day--always described by Andrew as "the day I ran slapbang into Pollard"--the relevant phone number was handed over, and Spectator, 14 May 1988, partily cited at "Eight Months on Ghazzah Street". Complete Review . Retrieved 30 July 2011. and "Eight Months on Ghazzah Street". Harper Collins . Retrieved 30 July 2011.

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 scruple of politeness. "Was that where you lived?" You poor things, that's all I can say. And you were in Zambia too? I've been to Lusaka, done a couple of stopovers. They're thieves in Lusaka. They'll take the wheels off your hire-car as soon as look at you. This friend of mine went into a pharmacy for a drop of penicillin, he was planning, you know, on being a bit naughty that night, and he believed in dosing himself first; and he came out, and no bloody wheels." His companion dug his plastic fork into a mille-feuille, and made no reply. "How long now?" he asked after a while.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 Set aside a full day to savor Simon Slater’s delightful reading of the Booker Prize–winning tale of Henry VIII’s court, seen through the eyes of his adviser Thomas Cromwell. Continue reading » parents have taken into their home. But the central event that informs the novel has occurred a decade earlier in South Africa, where the parents -- Ralph and Anna Eldred --went as missionaries, a phase in Ralph's lifelong career Yes." He had a boring job, she supposed, and a right to people's life stories. "Zambia for a bit, then Botswana." 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,

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 A heady spice of significance cleverly spiced with an aura of lurking menace." -- The New York Times Book Review husband, but she had once been assured, by a man called Jeff Pollard, who understood these things, that when corruption took root in a country it spread in no time at all from monarchs to tea boys, from ministers to filing clerks. She So Frances rarely risks it. She stays in, and learns about her new home from her husband and his colleagues, and her neighbours. Yasmin and her wheeler-dealer husband Raji are from Pakistan, and there’s a Saudi couple: Samira and her elusive husband Abdul Nasr. He believes that his choices have been the right ones, that this is where he wishes to be. . . . If his choices have led to this, have brought him to this moment, they have an intrinsic rightness; as for those other worlds, the alternativeMantel carefully builds up the story, horror replacing the stifling boredom of the place as she progresses. We all thought that the Fairfax bit got interesting. Felt like things were going to start connecting. Yasmin and Samira are both Muslim, and they aim to educate Frances about the Koran and the ‘disinformation’ about Sharia Law that is spread in the West. Frances is baffled by their acceptance of what she considers intolerable and tries to understand it. But though these Muslim women both try to justify the barbarity of Islamic punishments, for ‘crimes’ that allegedly don’t exist in this ‘pure’ society, Frances remains unconvinced. (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.) 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 » 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