The House of Doors: Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2023

Product Information

It is 1921 and at Cassowary House in the Straits Settlements of Penang, Robert Hamlyn is a well-to-do lawyer and his steely wife Lesley a society hostess.

Focused on Maugham’s stay in Penang in 1921, it concerns the inspiration behind one of his best-known short stories, The Letter. Full of the many subtleties involved in being a human in a variety of relationships -- with other people, with the culture of the time and place, and with oneself -- it is a book you need to just sink into. Lesley is fascinated by Sun’s blistering speech-making: ‘I felt that he was binding all of us to a covenant, a covenant for a future he would sacrifice everything for, even his life, to bring into existence. But as Lesley gradually reveals some of the secrets she's been keeping, Willie finds that the stories he gets from her are not at all the ones he expected to find.hanging from the ceiling beams were more doors, carefully spaced apart and suspended on wires so thin they seemed to be floating in the air. The Garden of Evening Mists won the Man Asian Literary Prize 2012, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She took all her jewels,’ Helena picked up the tale, ‘but she didn’t leave a letter for Graham, the poor man, not even a note. A friend of Robert from decades before, Maugham is accompanied by his reckless secretary and lover Gerald Haxton.

The sea is ‘emerald and turquoise, chipped with a million white scratches’, while on Penang Hill, ‘dragonflies with stained-glass wings stitched invisible threads in the air’. No visit, however, is as energising and destabilising as that of the novelist William Somerset Maugham, who emerges as one of the central characters in the book. Canongate will also be republishing Tan’s Booker-longlisted debut novel The Gift of Rain in its Canons series on 7th July. Proudlock was a member of Kuala Lumpur’s expat community, a conservative outpost nicknamed Cheltenham-on-the-Equator.There is Lesley the narrator getting involved with this cause and finding something she can truly believe in and fall into. The secret of finding good stories, Tan has the author explain to a local reporter, comes from travelling widely and gaining people’s trust: “A man is more willing to open up to you once you’ve revealed something personal, something shameful about yourself.