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Summary and Reviews of The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng

The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng

The House of Doors

by Tan Twan Eng
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus (9):
  • Readers' Rating (4):
  • First Published:
  • Oct 17, 2023, 320 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Oct 2024, 320 pages
  • Rate this book

About This Book

Book Summary

From the bestselling author of The Garden of Evening Mists, a spellbinding novel about love and betrayal, colonialism and revolution, storytelling and redemption.

The year is 1921. Lesley Hamlyn and her husband, Robert, a lawyer and war veteran, are living at Cassowary House on the Straits Settlement of Penang. When "Willie" Somerset Maugham, a famed writer and old friend of Robert's, arrives for an extended visit with his secretary Gerald, the pair threatens a rift that could alter more lives than one.

Maugham, one of the great novelists of his day, is beleaguered: Having long hidden his homosexuality, his unhappy and expensive marriage of convenience becomes unbearable after he loses his savings—and the freedom to travel with Gerald. His career deflating, his health failing, Maugham arrives at Cassowary House in desperate need of a subject for his next book. Lesley, too, is enduring a marriage more duplicitous than it first appears. Maugham suspects an affair, and, learning of Lesley's past connection to the Chinese revolutionary, Dr. Sun Yat Sen, decides to probe deeper. But as their friendship grows and Lesley confides in him about life in the Straits, Maugham discovers a far more surprising tale than he imagined, one that involves not only war and scandal but the trial of an Englishwoman charged with murder. It is, to Maugham, a story worthy of fiction.

A mesmerizingly beautiful novel based on real events, The House of Doors traces the fault lines of race, gender, sexuality, and power under empire, and dives deep into the complicated nature of love and friendship in its shadow.

Prologue

Lesley

Doornfontein, South Africa, 1947

A story, like a bird of the mountain, can carry a name beyond the clouds, beyond even time itself. Willie Maugham said that to me, many years ago.

He has not appeared in my thoughts in a long time, but as I gaze at the mountains from my stoep on this autumn morning I can hear his thin, dry voice, his diction precise, correct, like everything else about him. In my memory I see him again, on his last night in our old house on the other side of the world, the two of us on the verandah behind the house, talking quietly, the full moon a coracle of light adrift above the sea. Everyone else in the house had already retired to bed. When morning came he sailed from Penang, and I never saw him again.

Ten thousand days and nights have drifted down the endless river since that evening. I live on the shores of a different sea now, a sea of silent stone and sand.

Half an hour earlier I was finishing my breakfast on ...

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!
  1. Willie is already a well-known and celebrated author when he arrives in Penang, but his story is not the main focus of the novel. What is Willie's role in the novel? In what way does his story underscore the stories of the other characters'?
  2. Lesley is critical that Willie writes only about unhappy marriages and adultery. Why do you think she takes this view? How do her own experiences tie into this criticism, and do you think she sincerely believes it?
  3. What transpires between Willie and Lesley the night of Noel's party? What made Lesley's attitude towards him shift and decide to make Willie her confidante?
  4. Lesley asks herself if her life would have been different if she'd asked Robert at the beginning of their courtship why he left...
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Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

In writing The House of Doors, Twan Eng effectively reverse engineers the work of the real-life Maugham, using his book of short stories The Casuarina Tree to envision a context within which the author might have been sparked to create his fiction. In so doing, Twan Eng crafts a novel that has much to say about the very art of narrative crafting, and structurally functions as something of an infinity mirror held up to a repeating interplay between fiction and nonfiction...continued

Full Review Members Only (636 words)

(Reviewed by Danielle McClellan).

Media Reviews

Minneapolis Star Tribune
The House of Doors is propelled by fascinating characters, the tension over their gradual revelations and Eng's exquisite writing...an arresting, melancholy story about romantic complications.

Financial Times (UK)
Expertly constructed, tightly plotted and richly atmospheric.

Sunday Times (UK)
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 House of Doors is a finely accomplished piece of work.

Times Literary Supplement (UK)
What elevates Eng's book is the sheer beauty of his writing – restrained, elegant, precise, every detail accurate, every line considered ... He resides in the very top row. The sentences here remind me of Shirley Hazzard, or perhaps James Salter. I can offer little higher praise.

The Guardian
An ambitious, elaborate fiction about fictions ... a portrait of the artist in crisis, a meditation on how and why we tell stories and a heated courtroom drama.

Booklist (starred review)
Exquisite ... Tan takes on a behemoth task here: combining sensational fact and intimate fiction in a British colonial Asian setting complicated by white privilege, politics, social hypocrisy, gender inequity, racism, homophobia, and more ... [He] succeeds in delivering another intricate literary gift.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)
The narrative dwells on memory and loss, its lush, dreamy prose evoking the bygone days of colonial pre-WWII British Malaya amid musings on life's ephemeral nature, while never losing its eye for injustice ... This is a stunner.

Kirkus Reviews
Graceful and well-researched.

Reader Reviews

Anthony Conty

Historical Fiction for Newbies
“The House of Doors” by Tan Twan Eng tells interconnected tales about characters within the same realm. A married couple, Lesley and Robert, allow a famous writer and his assistant to live with them in a time of personal trouble. Secrets about their ...   Read More
Shahana Haris

It's a book about memory, misfortune and social cacophony; an over the top misfortune that sideslips as the decades progressed and passes the story stick among Lesley and Maugham
It is 1921. Lesley Hamlyn and her better half, Robert, a legal counselor and war veteran, are residing at Cassowary House on the Waterways Settlement of Penang. At the point when "Willie" Somerset Maugham, a celebrated essayist and close buddy of ...   Read More
Shree Rajak

This book is really good.
"The House of Doors" is a captivating mystery novel written by an author named Jen Ferguson. It's a story about a mysterious house that holds secrets behind each door. The main character embarks on a thrilling journey to uncover the truth and solve ...   Read More
Rihana

Tragic
The House of Doors is a 2023 historical novel by Tan Twan Eng, published by Bloomsbury Publishing. The novel, set in the 1920s British colony of the Federated Malay States, tells the stories of the local residents and visitors, including a ...   Read More

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Beyond the Book



Sun Yat-sen

Sun Yat-sen In the novel The House of Doors, Lesley Hamlyn volunteers as a translator for Sun Yat-sen's political movement in Penang, Malaysia. Sun Yat-sen is one of the foremost figures in Chinese political history. By leading China from an empire to a republic, he also became an important inspiration to other independence movements of twentieth-century Asia. Sun is often regarded as the father of modern China.

Sun Yat-sen was born in 1866 to a family living in a rural village in the southern province of Guandong. At age 10, he and his mother moved to the island of Maui, in Hawai'i, where his elder brother ran a successful farm. Sun took a great interest in the culture and ideas he encountered and absorbed at the local missionary school. This ...

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Read-Alikes

Read-Alikes Full readalike results are for members only

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