Eight Months on Ghazzah Street by Hilary Mantel

Eight Months on Ghazzah Street by Hilary Mantel

When Frances Shore moves to Saudi Arabia, she settles in a nondescript sublet, sure that common sense and an open mind will serve her well with her Muslim neighbors. 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. It's all in her imagination, she's told by her neighbors; the upstairs flat is empty, no one uses the roof. But Frances knows otherwise, and day by day, her sense of foreboding grows even as her sense of herself begins to disintegrate.

Hilary Mantel is the author of several best-selling novels, including Wolf Hall, which won the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. The Man Booker Prize and the Costa Book Award were also given to Bring Up the Bodies, Book Two of the Thomas Cromwell Trilogy. A Change of Climate, A Place of Better Safety, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, An Experiment in Love, The Giant, O'Brien, Fludd, Beyond Black, Every Day Is Mother's Day, and Vacant Possession are some of her other works. She's also the author of the memoir Giving Up the Ghost. The Hawthornden Award was awarded to Mantel, and her reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and The London Review of Books. Her husband and she live in England.