ABSTRACT
Author of both historical and contemporary novels, Hilary Mantel is a writer who eludes pigeonholing or easy definition. She has written books that examine inequalities of class, race and gender in South Africa and in Saudi Arabia. Mantel's first novel, Every Day Is Mother's Day told of the claustrophobic relationship between an apparently retarded girl, Muriel Axon, and her mother Evelyn, a widowed spiritualist. Drawing on Mantel's own experience of living in Saudi Arabia, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street is her most overtly political novel, filled with a sense of outrage at the Saudi social system and Western willingness, for financial reasons, to turn a blind eye to its human rights abuses. Mantel sharply portrays the injustices, miseries and complexities of the apartheid system but the real strength of the novel lies in its unflinching and unsentimental acknowledgement of the power that memory has to haunt and disfigure the present.
