Hooray – yet another of my 20 Books of Summer 2024 project! Cathy from 746 Books has been running 20 Books of Summer since 2014, and I’ve been taking part since 2015 (see all my lists and links here). I’m actually currently reading Book 7 so doing really well! Ali passed me this one after I was intrigued by her review (I do love immigrant stories). Of the seven books I acquired in June 2023, I have now read and reviewed two, and they both came from Ali! I feel like I’ve been reading a few books from mid-2023 onwards but know I have some older ones coming up next month. This book also covers one of my 2024 TBR project reads.

Hilary Mantel – “Eight Months on Ghazzah Street”

(21 June 2023, from Ali)

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 sour; so now when you were off to Jeddah, people said, ‘Don’t fall off any balconies, will you?’ It became monotonous And their talk had left an image in her mind, whichh she did not like but could not now eradicate; the image of the broken body, still in its mortuary drawer. (p. 18)

One of the things Hilary Mantel was very good at was creating an atmosphere – here of horror and anxiety – and she does it very well in this novel originally published in 1988 (I assume my copy is a reprint as it mentions her later Booker Prize wins).

Here we meet Frances and Andrew Shore, professional expats, who met and married in Africa and are now in Saudi Arabia, Andrew building a fancy new ministry and Frances basically trapped in a flat, only able to interact with her neighbours. Railing at first against being trapped inside the numerous bolts and gates, she finds going outside is not much fun, being constantly harrassed on the street by male drivers, and kept under control by the rumours that swirl around the expat community about nasty things that have happened to Western women who haven’t toed the line. But is anyone safe, however careful they are? What is going on in the empty flat above theirs?

We know something horrible is going to happen as we read a memo from Andrew’s employer mentioning this at the start of the book – there’s the odd further memo and also Frances’ first-person diary entries as well as the third-person narrative. The feeling of Something Horrible Coming grows and grows as we realise how actually horrible all the other expats and their wives are, trapped by earning so much more than they can elsewhere, always trying to leave and never managing. A particularly disturbing image comes when the little tiny Western women in their miniskirts and sundresses have to be moved from the architect’s model of the new building.

What will become of Frances? Will she and Andrew pull together or apart under these new strains, given that Frances starts to feel a block in her throat when she tries to talk to him?

Many of the characters are unlikeable, as Ali’s book group pointed out in their discussion outlined in her review, but it’s an interesting book of people trying to do their best under a difficult regime, and the way that kind of regime will push people’s characters into fear or cunning.

This is Book 6 in my 20 Books of Summer 2024.

This is Book 40 in my 2024 TBR project – 101 to go!