Christine Mangan · 2018 · thriller

Christine Mangan's 1956 Tangier, in the last months of the International Zone. A woman who has spent a year afraid to leave her flat opens the door to the college roommate she has not spoken to since her fiance died - and is walked back out into the city by somebody who will not take no for an answer.

1. 1
   Bennington

   The Vermont college where Alice Shipley and Lucy Mason are roommates - inseparable until the night Alice's fiance drives off a road in a storm, after which the two do not speak for over a year.

2. 2
   Tangier

   1956, and the flat in the new town where Alice has spent a year hiding from the heat and the crowds - married quickly to a man spending her inheritance, and answering the door one afternoon to Lucy.

3. 3
   The Petit Socco

   The medina, the cafes and the crowd Alice has been too frightened to enter - and Lucy walking her into all of it, which reads as kindness for about fifty pages and then stops reading as kindness.

4. 4
   Cape Spartel

   The headland west of the city where the Atlantic meets the Mediterranean, and the excursions out of Tangier - the parts of Morocco Alice sees only because Lucy decides she is going to see them.

5. 5
   Tangier

   John disappears, and the city that was merely oppressive becomes something else - the International Zone in its last months, where a foreigner can vanish and the paperwork is somebody else's problem.

6. 6
   The Strait

   Fourteen kilometres of water to Europe, and one of the two women crossing it - Mangan's ending owes a good deal to Highsmith, and the boat is the point at which it says so out loud.