The House of Doors: Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2023

Product Information

His straight-backed formal prose framed the emotional tumult of the English expats, exposing a colonial society that was provisional and precarious; stitched on to the tropics and at risk of collapse. An additional focus of the story is that of Lesley's friend Ethel who is incarcerated after she shoots a man attempting to rape her. Quick to read, the beauty of the language and the character insight, as well as the critical historical context, stay with the reader long after it closes. The House of Doors is by turns a portrait of the artist in crisis, a meditation on how and why we tell stories and a heated courtroom drama, spotlighting the Proudlock affair.

The beautiful writing captures the moods and backdrops making you feel like you are fly on the wall observing the action as it happens.The prose in this novel is breathtaking and the descriptions of Penang make the setting feel like a character. Graham – the husband – bought a piece of land on Jannie van der Walt’s farm and built their new home on it, a great big house. In the evenings Robert and I would relax on the verandah with our whisky stengahs and gin pahits and watch another day slip away behind the mountains.

It’s a book about memory, loss and cultural dissonance; a high-flown tragedy that sideslips through the decades and passes the narrative baton between Lesley and Maugham. The book is Tan’s first since the publication of the Booker-shortlisted The Garden of Evening Mists in 2012, and like its predecessor it moves between different time periods while immersing us in the history of 20th-century British Malaya. Maugham suspects an affair, and, learning of Lesley's past connection to the Chinese revolutionary, Dr. One doesn't have to know anything about Somerset Maugham to appreciate it, but the echoes make the work even richer. My eyes follow the two birds as they drift on the span of their out-stretched wings, writing circles over circles on the empty page of sky.At first wary and even condemnatory, Lesley soon finds that Maugham prompts her to open up in a way that she cannot with her husband.