EIGHT MONTHS ON GHAZZAH STREET: Hilary Mantel

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They occupy one, the Pakistani expats Raji and Yasmin another, the Saudi couple Samira and Abdul Nasr a third. The most engaging moments in Mantel's intriguing new novel occur when the uneducated Irish characters who make up the loutish retinue of ""the Giant, O'Brien"" converse. Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. Andrew Shore shook hands with Eric Parsons, the Saudi man; Jeff Pollard, talking, conducted him down from the terrace and out into the street.

The Pakistani neighbor of the protagonist, Frances Shore, tries to reassure her by explaining that they don't really stone adulteresses any more -- they throw a few token stones then shoot her. This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. spines of scaffolding, the sheets of plate glass; then last of all the marble, the most popular facing material, held on to the plain walls behind it with some sort of adhesive. The company owns the apartment the Shores move into; it happens to be in an Arab neighborhood, and Frances is largely isolated.Mantel paints the varied expat communities (and the ugly corporations that do business there) very well, her opprobrium doled out equally to natives and foreigners alike. Soon, the crackle from the PA system: Ladies and gentlemen, we are now beginning our descent to King Abdul Aziz International Airport.

Cut to eight or nine months earlier (in a book entitled Eight Months on Gazzah Street, the street where Andrew and Frances live) and you’re immediately plunged into a state of dread which Mantel develops masterfully. The UK building trade had slumped into what seemed chronic recession; they didn't know what they were going to do. It's through Frances' talks with these women that issues of veiling, religion and patriarchy are discussed, rehearsing all sides of the debate.Hand hovering over the trolley, he seemed to approve her choice; as if what lay ahead were something to brace yourself for, not to celebrate.

Andrew, a civil engineer, is there to make a lot of money by working on the construction of a new Ministry Building. I wrote my second in a small expatriate compound, in an ageing prefabricated house where rats bounced and scurried in the roof. But then last year when he was coming back after his summer holidays they took away his Test Match videos. The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A chilling portrait of an authoritarian society as a young Englishwoman moves with her husband into a Saudi Arabian neighborhood and finds murder lurking behind the shuttered windows and closed doors.

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.