The House of Doors

From the Booker-shortlisted author of The Garden of Evening Mists comes an evocative, rich tale of love, betrayal and morality in 1920s Penang

Willie Somerset Maugham is one of the greatest writers of the early twentieth century. But in 1921 he is beleaguered by an unhappy marriage, ill-health and business interests that have gone badly awry. He is also struggling to write.

His friend Robert Hamlyn offers an escape in the Straits Settlements of Penang, where Robert's steely wife Lesley learns to see Willie as he is - a man who has no choice but to mask his true self.

As Willie prepares to leave, Lesley confides in him secrets of her own, including how she came to know the charismatic revolutionary Dr Sun Yat Sen. And more scandalous still, her connection to an Englishwoman charged with murder in the Kuala Lumpur courts - a tragedy drawn from fact, and worthy of fiction.

Review

"Outstanding . . . The House of Doors again displays [Eng's] talent for atmospheric evocation of place and period . . . Beautifully detailed and encompassing the vagaries of Maugham's life, the contours of his creativity and the personal and political tensions covertly quivering through the sultry colony around him, The House of Doors is a finely accomplished piece of work" ― Sunday Times

"Fascinating, engrossing and has given me infinite pleasure" -- COLM TÓIBÍN ― Guardian

"A tremendous feat of literary imagination. Highly evocative, richly observed and entirely convincing, it is a tour de force!" -- WILLIAM BOYD

"Expertly constructed, tightly plotted and richly atmospheric" ― Financial Times

"Sex, scandal and Somerset Maugham . . . an elegant meditation on oppression, repression and loneliness . . . The House of Doors pays tribute to storytelling itself as a means not just of memorialising, but recreating . . . imbued with quiet yearning, this a pleasurably old-fashioned novel" ― Daily Telegraph

"Perfectly poised . . . a fascinatingly layered novel . . . Through this deceptively lulling atmosphere, Twan has woven a superb, quietly complex tale of love, duty and betrayal" ― Literary Review

"If any book is going to beat Tan Twan Eng's The House of Doors to the Booker Prize, it'll have to be very good indeed" -- PHILIP PULLMAN

"What elevates Eng's book is the sheer beauty of his writing - restrained, elegant, precise, every detail accurate, every line considered. Pain, loss and disappointment seep from every page, as do beauty and compassion . . . Tan Twan Eng resides in the very top row" ― Times Literary Supplement

"A pleasure to read . . . Tan's style is formal, quiet, sedate but alive with detail" -- JOHN SELF ― The Critic

"This is Twan's third book, and he just keeps getting better. He is a somewhat spiritual writer, with a love of gardens, but the stories are always about the brutal consequences of ethnic strife, revolution,and war. The combination is mesmerising" -- KEN FOLLETT ― The Week

About the Author

Tan Twan Eng was born in Penang, Malaysia. His debut novel The Gift of Rain was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2007 and has been widely translated. The Garden of Evening Mists won the Man Asian Literary Prize 2012 and the 2013 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012 and the 2014 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The House of Doors is his third novel.