SOURCE: “You Bet Your Life,” in London Review of Books, Vol. 10, No. 8, April 21, 1988, pp. 20–2.

In the following review, Walters praises Mantel's narrative techniques in Eight Months on Ghazzah Street.

In Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, Hilary Mantel makes skillful use of thriller techniques, as a way of keeping us edgily involved with her heroine, who's tense and lonely, and anxiously trying to make sense of a world she fears, dislikes, and certainly doesn't understand. Frances Shore's engineer husband is working in Saudi Arabia; she can't get a job, women aren't allowed to drive or walk on the streets or even go shopping alone. Occasional meetings with other expatriates are comic disasters—Frances is spiky and argumentative, not the sort of woman to be smoothly polite even to her husband's boss. So she's a virtual prisoner in her block of flats, making tentative but frustrating contact with her two...