EIGHT MONTHS ON GHAZZAH STREET: Hilary Mantel

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Already it felt further; watches moved on, a day in a life condensed to a scramble at a check-in desk, a walk to a departure gate; a day cut short and eclipsed, hurtling on into advancing night.

As she stepped out from the kerb, he revved his engine, the car sprang forward, and she had to leap from under its wheels. So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. Next months book club meeting (Tuesday 25th June) will be hosted by Natasha Wilson as I am off to a wedding! She has only constantly changing rumours to hang on to, and no one with whom to share her creeping unease.In Mandel’s taut sequel to Wolf Hall, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn have been married for more than two years, but unable to produce a male heir. The press reports had left an image in people's minds: of lazy, glitzy, transient lives, of hard liquor and easy money, of amoral people turned scared and sour. She keeps her doubts to herself, for example, when she is told that hand amputations are done humanely, with a doctor there to prevent infection. Soon, the crackle from the PA system: Ladies and gentlemen, we are now beginning our descent to King Abdul Aziz International Airport. Andrew first poured himself a brandy; then he sat for some time and regarded the phone in their bungalow, like a man in a trance, or a man praying.

Andrew, a civil engineer, and Frances met and married in Africa but come to Jeddah- -a place of blinding heat, ugly buildings, and underlying menace- -when Andrew accepts a job with an international construction company. The operator came back once or twice, bellowing in his ear, but she didn't forget him entirely; in time she came up with what might be her best offer, a line to Mafeking. Turadup had got a toehold in Zambia before the bottom dropped out of copper, putting up expatriate housing in Kabwe, the mining town that had once been known as Broken Hill; then when Zambia went down the drain they moved south a bit, putting in an unsuccessful tender for work on the new international airport at Gaborone; then picking up work around that city, piping water and building a clinic for a shanty town that had become permanent faute de mieux. that, once, someone might have offered him a bribe; but through the other party's ineptitude and poor English, and Andrew's naivete, the occasion had passed without profit.In fact, this gothic part of the story is almost a subplot, or a symbol for the much more mundane corruption that is portrayed throughout the novel. to consider any of this at all, and simply to enjoy Hilary Mantel's smart, astringent and marvelously upsetting fiction. The date is 2 Muharram, by the Hijra calendar, and the evening temperature is 88°F; the year is 1405.

All the other window dressing - an upstairs apartment that is supposedly used for a love tryst, the various punishments meted out to adulterers, the main character's own feelings of isolation - really didn't amount to much, mostly because Mantel did so little to make these plot points interesting.Her novel about the French Revolution, ‘A Place of Greater Safety’ is an absolute masterpiece, and helped me to understand how frightening and volatile societies are during a period of revolution.