The House of Doors: Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2023

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There is not the slightest stir of wind, and there is no sound, not even the usual petulant bleating of sheep from the valley. 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. Focused on Maugham’s stay in Penang in 1921, it concerns the inspiration behind one of his best-known short stories, The Letter. It is slow going at first but like dipping into a pool of warm water the beauty of the sentences soon enveloped me.

In The House of Doors, set in the lush tropics of Penang in the first quarter of the twentieth century, Eng tells through the eyes of Lesley, who narrates alternating chapters, of her life and her marriage and focuses on the 1921 visit of Somerset Maugham, an old friend of her husband's Robert, and of her friend Ethel Proudfoot's 1910 (1911 in "real life") murder trial. The House of Doors is Tan’s first novel since 2012’s Booker-shortlisted The Garden of Evening Mists and shares many of its themes. These actions in themselves are entirely unacceptable for a woman of her station, white, British, upper-class, and married. The subtle jibes at the tradition of self-satisfied British prose as it described the revolutions of China and the far-flung offshoots of Empire are combined with the consistent theme of patriarchal domination in this entertaining novel: real-life accounts of broken marriages and murder trials in the Straits Settlements of Penang help to express a new tone to the stories of the heroic travellers that criss-crossed the continent in the first half of the last century, dragging their families and their collective futures with them. She finds other outlets to vent her emotions, notably, becoming involved, though peripherally, with the Chinese revolutionary movement led by Dr.

Robert and Lesley were already at the breakfast table, walled off from each other behind their newspapers. There is Sun Yet-Sen, a true historical figure of the time who is in town to raise money for his cause of overthrowing the current Chinese emperor and establishing a republic in China. I often wondered which of the two was more oppressive: the silence of the desert, or the silence between the husband and his wife. The Garden of Evening Mists won the Man Asian Literary Prize 2013 and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012 and the 2014 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Reminiscent of The Great Gatsby in a way, it explores unexpected friendships and relationships in a nuanced way, given its interesting political and cultural landscape.

On the night of 23 April 1911, Ethel Proudlock took her husband’s revolver and shot a man dead at her house in Malaysia. It is the autumn equinox today; here, in the southern bowl of the earth, the portions of day and night are exactly equal. Real people such as Maugham, his secretary and lover Gerald Haxton, Sun Yat-Sen, and a woman named Ethel Proudlock who stood trial for shooting a man in self-defense are deftly woven into an absorbing plot with fictional characters about love and memory and the power of stories.He and his friends are also ‘reeling from the death knell rung across England by poor Oscar Wilde’s fate’. We stayed a pleasant fortnight in a hotel by the sea before taking the train to Beaufort West, a little town three hundred or so miles to the northeast. She reveals secrets no one else has ever known and the reader listens along with Maugham to her beautiful but heart-breaking story. Like his previous books, Tan Twan Eng’s The House of Doors is a book so engrossing and entertaining that you can’t put it down. 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.