This sounds fascinating and one I’d like to read, where I haven’t massively got on with the one I have read or fancied the big trilogy (sorry, Hilary: I transcribed an interview with you and you were great, though! at Cambridge said this was an excellent study of both women and expats in Saudi Arabia (that was her special area, so she knew what she was talking about). The East is portrayed as mysterious and secretive as opposed to the intrusive and nosy Western expats. 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.

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.At the same time, Mantel has never shied away from creating unsympathetic or nasty main characters, so maybe she meant for the reader to come away thinking that the main character was pretty racist? You could feel the worries of the boss and his wife as they tried to get a decent boozy party up for their employees only to have it thwarted by the morality police patrols and road blocks. Mantel describes the difficulties of being a women in Saudi, not just being able to carry along with 'normal' activities but actually almost becoming invisible and irrelevant in society. It holds a bunch of deep Hilary Mantel thoughts, but the surroundings are so glum and the lifestyle holding such barriers of restrictive movement and solitary boredom, that this quality leeches into the book itself. Things always start off as being relatively straight forward and obvious in the mind but the maze of thoughts and ideas that Mantel always seems to present takes you to a place that one could never have imagined at the start of the book.

The big boom of construction was winding down in Jeddah, but Andrew goes out and establishes a life while the company wrangled an entrance visa for Fran. The build up of tension and the oscillation between the narrator thinking that dark deeds are taking place all around her to feeling that it's all in her mind is very finely done. Though overwhelmingly written the past tense, little bits of present tense – sometimes a single sentence in the middle of a paragraph - would occur for no apparent reason. As the months pass, Frances tries to adjust to a society where women are treated as inferiors and the slightest infraction of Islamic law can lead to imprisonment, or worse.

Andrew says that she is imagining it, though others suggest that the Deputy Minister, who allegedly owns the building, may be using it for a love nest. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. As Frances listens to her friend “explain” Islam and the ways of Islamic women, she has food for thought at last, but not in the way she expected.