Synopses & Reviews
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. Its all in her imagination, shes 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
"Mantel is the blackest of black comedians; she can make your flesh creep with horror and especially with the apprehension of it. Her approach is slow and stealthy; the hair on the back of your neck rises."-Gabriele Annan, The New York Times Review of Books
Review
"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
Synopsis
A taut and terrifying trip into a distorting mirror--a novel as tense, immediate, and chilling as the world it depicts.
"A Middle Eastern Turn of the Screw with an insidious power to grip."-Time Out
About the Author
Hilary Mantel is the bestselling author of many novels including Wolf Hall, which won the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Bring Up the Bodies, Book Two of the Thomas Cromwell Trilogy, was also awarded the Man Booker Prize and the Costa Book Award. She is also the author of A Change of Climate, A Place of Greater 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. She has also written a memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. 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. She lives in England with her husband.