From the two-time Man Booker Prize winner author of Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror & the Light, a prescient and haunting novel of life in Saudi Arabia.
Frances Shore is a cartographer by trade, a maker of maps, but when her husband's work takes her to Saudi Arabia she finds herself unable to map the Kingdom's areas of internal darkness. The regime is corrupt and harsh, the expatriates are hard-drinking money-grubbers, and her Muslim neighbours are secretive, watchful. The streets are not a woman's territory; confined in her flat, she finds her sense of self begin to dissolve. She hears whispers, sounds of distress from the 'empty' flat above her head. She has only rumours, no facts to hang on to, and no one with whom to share her creeping unease. As her days empty of certainty and purpose, her life becomes a blank - waiting to be filled by violence and disaster.
- ISBN10 0140108157
- ISBN13 9780140108156
- Publish Date 21 February 1989 (first published 28 April 1988)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 7 August 2002
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Penguin Books Ltd
- Edition New edition
- Format Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
- Pages 304
- Language English