Eight Months on Ghazzah Street - by Hilary Mantel (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"A bold, searingly honest and uncompromising novel." --San Francisco Chronicle

"A heady spice of significance cleverly spiced with an aura of lurking menace." --The New York Times Book Review

"A violent conspiracy tale with a nuanced psychological portrait of a woman learning to trust her own eyes and ears." --Entertainment Weekly

"A tautly written tale of suspense that makes brilliant use of monotony and claustrophobia to heighten the heroine's growing sense of danger." --The Washington Post Book World

"[A] blend of dark and light, comedy and tragedy, heart-in-the-mouth narrative and slow-working analysis of the human condition." --Los Angeles Times

About the Author

Hilary Mantel was the author of the bestselling novel Wolf Hall and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, which both won the Booker Prize. The final novel of the Wolf Hall trilogy, The Mirror & the Light, debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and won world-wide critical acclaim. Mantel wrote seventeen celebrated books, including the memoir Giving Up the Ghost, and she was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the Walter Scott Prize, the Costa Book Award, the Hawthornden Prize, and many other accolades. In 2014, Mantel was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She died at age seventy in 2022.