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.

When Frances Shore joins her engineer husband in Jeddah she is warned not to ask questions. But bored, she begins to speculate about her neighbours and the empty flat above her. At first she believes the flat is being used as a lover's tryst - then she suspects something more sinister.

An English couple's life in Saudi Arabia told through the eyes of Frances, the wife. She describes the heat, the ugliness and the menace of Islamic law. Men stroll in the street with rifles and from the apartment upstairs comes sobbing. It is nothing her Arab friends tell her, simply a millionaire's mistress, but Frances knows they are lying. Finally, there is murder.

Frances Shore is a cartographer by trade, a maker of maps, but when her husband's work takes them 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 and watchful.

A taut and terrifying trip into a distorting mirror--a novel as tense, immediate, and chilling as the world it depicts. "A Middle Eastern Turn of the Screw with an insidious power to grip."-Time Out

When Frances Shore joins her engineer husband in Saudia Arabia, she is troubled by culture shock, boredom, and the sound of sobs coming from the apartment above, although her neighbors say it is all in her imagination.

When Frances Shore moves to Saudi Arabia, she settles in a nondescript sublet, sure that common sense and an open mind will serve her well with her Muslim neighbors. But in the dim, airless flat, Frances spends lonely days writing in her diary, hearing the sounds of sobs through the pipes from the floor above, and seeing the flitting shadows of men on the stairwell. It's all in her imagination, she's told by her neighbors; the upstairs flat is empty, no one uses the roof. But Frances knows otherwise, and day by day, her sense of foreboding grows even as her sense of herself begins to disintegrate.

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Fiction. Literature. Una historia de suspense doméstico con todos los ingredientes de un thriller político y muchos temas de actualidad, como la situación de la mujer en el mundo musulmán. Una mujer británica de mediana edad acompaña a su esposo ingeniero en una estancia laboral en Jeddah, Arabia Saudí. Desde su llegada, la total privación de derechos de las mujeres afectará su intimidad y su relación con los demás expatriados. Además, un misterio que tendrá lugar en un piso vecino presuntamente vacío así como la muerte por un oscuro accidente y un intento de asesinato nos mantendrán en vilo hasta que la protagonista y su marido abandonen el país. Publicada originalmente en 1988, es un thriller sorprendentemente actual basado en los meses que la autora vivió en Arabia Saudí, estamos ante una novela de suspense que narra la lucha de una mujer occidental por adaptarse a la opresiva sociedad saudí y que pone sobre la mesa temas como la corrupción política, el machismo en las sociedades islámicas, el fanatismo religioso y l