She did not just describe the physical aspects of the country, she was able to put me back in that time and place and make me remember the confusion, the low-grade fear, the suspicion, the boredom, the frustration, the intrigue . She begins a diary recording her impressions; makes friends with Yasmin and Samira, two young married Islamic women on the block; and wonders about the supposedly empty apartment above hers and Andrew's, from which she's certain that she's heard sobbing. page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. The answers to all the questions that beset you are not in facts, which are the greatest illusion of all, but in your own heart, in your own habits, in your limitations, in your fear. Mantel's depiction of the mortal threat of living in a country that has no rule of law is devastatingly realistic.

Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. Yet, almost immediately following this exchange, Fairfax shows Frances a photo of his wife, who he describes as a "giantess," a woman who married him only because she could walk down the aisle in high heels rather than "shuffling up the aisle in gym shoes and bending her knees. Being kicked out of Saudi Arabia is one of the better outcomes; the worst is having to be in a jail or a hospital, where things happen, things that you can never prove, so officially, they never happened. Yasmin, though Pakistani, is very defensive of the Saudis, while her husband is a sleazy player of some kind.

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. I have never read anything that so accurately describes the insidious fear that is ever-present, or the dreaded boredom, depression and loss of self-respect that come from living in the Kingdom.

Frances is understandably concerned with the treatment of women and does not accept the justifications offered by Yasmin and Samira. I don't know why Mantel devised a central character who was so unsympathetic, and I hesitate to think that Mantel herself saw anything admirable in Frances Shore. She and her husband Andrew have been living and working in Africa since they met but now Andrew’s work is bringing them to Saudi Arabia.Parts of the book might be considered racist today, but then I guess that was how people were in the '80s.