Mantel was the winner of the Hawthornden Prize, and her reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books. Frances is understandably concerned with the treatment of women and does not accept the justifications offered by Yasmin and Samira. We all know this backward desert of Wahabism is terrible, but just how offensive it is to Western sensibilities, how hypocritical the royal family is to commit every sin in the Koran while inflicting this puritanical code on its citizens, and how corrupt this combination of hypocrisy and wealth can be is -- painfully -- drawn with Mantel's gifts of description and characterization. There is a mystery, a shadowy bit of skulduggery that gathers force toward the end, but the impact of the book is not in this artifice but in the portrayal of life in Saudi Arabia based on the author's own experience of living there.

For him, it’s not just about the money he can make in Saudi Arabia: he’s fallen in love with the architecture of the building he’s contracted to construct. At once a riveting thriller and a subtle political tale, set in a place as harsh and unforgiving as the desert. Perhaps it's asking too much to yearn for lip-licking, hip-thrusting, transcendent prose that forces you to believe that there is a writing god. Long before Hilary Mantel became famous for her acclaimed Booker Prize historical novels, I knew her as an author of novels like Beyond Black (2006) with its dark humour and macabre undertones.

Out of desperation, Frances becomes friends of sorts with the Pakistani woman across the hall and the Arab woman living upstairs, each of whom explains her dismaying rationalization for the role of women in this puritanical society. While there is not a great deal of plot – apart from the something nasty in the attic plot – Mantel’s story is well worth reading for seeing the cultural differences and how Westerners cope (or, often, don’t cope) with them. All the other window dressing - an upstairs apartment that is supposedly used for a love tryst, the various punishments meted out to adulterers, the main character's own feelings of isolation - really didn't amount to much, mostly because Mantel did so little to make these plot points interesting. You might as well say you should respect the customs of cannibals or acknowledge that slavery is legitimate if it's part of the local culture, because the Wahabi perversion of Islam is as benighted and savage. 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.

They had run into him once before, in Lusaka, and not liked him particularly; but now Pollard was offering a job, and Andrew needed one. you an open mind, and discretion, and common sense; if you have those with you, you can manage anywhere.The British expats discuss some of the more famous customs of the country, like cutting off the hands of thieves, by noting in passing that they use anesthetic and have doctors standing by to bind up the wound. When he arrived home late that afternoon, Frances was on the porch packing a tea chest, wrapping up their dinner service in pieces of the Mafeking Mail. And to the right, blackness, tilting, and a glow of red, the slow tires that seem to ring cities at night.

The author herself lived in Jeddah for four years under not dissimilar circumstances and so the extremely unappealing depiction of the city, its inhabitants, both locals and expats, and Saudi society is, fair or not, based on intimate acquaintance. She is then told that in fact the flat is used by a junior member of the royal family for illicit trysts, but she comes to suspect that is simply a tale put out to satisfy a foreigner's curiosity. 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.There was a main road to negotiate, but it was mid-morning, fairly quiet, and she never had any trouble crossing at the lights. A veteran of expat life in Africa, she was prepared for restrictions on her lifestyle but is appalled by the reality of life in a punitive patriarchal theocracy. on Ghazzah Street'' and ''A Change of Climate,'' two witty, disturbing and memorable novels by Hilary Mantel. At the moment Ghazzah Street is about a mile and a half from the Red Sea, but in this place land and sea are in flux, they are negotiable.

The decorative marble lining Frances' staircase is ''flecked with black and a fatty cream, revoltingly edible, like some kind of Polish sausage. And on that day—always described by Andrew as "the day I ran slap-bang into Pollard"—the relevant phone number was handed over, and their future was set in train. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. Officially, like a lot of other things (alcohol and extramarital sex being two other obvious examples) bribery does not exist but it clearly does. Too easy to say that she was expressing common viewpoints from that era, maybe it would be address more directly if it was written now?

It took me some time to read this horrifying novel by Hilary Mantel, not because it isn't well-written or compelling, but because often it's simply so painful to read. Their complicity with the ruling regime and the subtle idea of vast salaries as a form of bribe to mind their own business, even turn a blind eye when necessary, implicates capitalism and those who benefit from it. Exiled more or less voluntarily to former colonial outposts, these civilized expatriates are appalled by their first glimpses of the local customs: arrest and torture in South Africa, state-sponsored sexism in Saudi Arabia.