SOURCE: “Bosphorescence,” in Observer, May 1, 1988, p. 43.

In the following review of Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, Barnes asserts that “Mantel has written an elegant and disturbing account of the changes wrought by alienation.”

A roaming topography also takes over in Hilary Mantel's Eight Months on Ghazzah Street where a young woman, less cosmopolitan than Madame de Rochefauld, makes a long-distance journey, and plunges abruptly into the closed world of Saudi Arabia. Like Catherine, Frances Shore encounters a mixture of routine and surprises, which hardly compensates for arriving at the wrong time.

This Englishwoman joins her engineer husband who has been recruited to devise a new Government building just as the oil price is falling and the construction boom is coming to an end. It is, he tells her cheerfully, ‘the last of the best’ and a final opportunity to accumulate in spite of the hardships.

Hilary Mantel skilfully...