The House of Doors: Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2023

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s Penang is where we meet our protagonist Lesley Hamlyn. Her husband Robert is a lawyer, and it’s fair to say that they live a very comfortable life, mixing in the very highest circles. As Willie prepares to leave and face his demons, Lesley confides secrets of her own, including how she came to know the charismatic Dr Sun Yat Sen, a revolutionary fighting to overthrow the imperial dynasty of China. And more scandalous still, she reveals her connection to the case of an Englishwoman charged with murder in the Kuala Lumpur courts – a tragedy drawn from fact, and worthy of fiction. The other guests – farmers and their wives from around the area – were already gathered in the straggly garden behind the farmhouse when we arrived. We joined them in a circle beneath a camelthorn tree, its bare branches spiked with thin white thorns as long as my little finger. The laughter and shrieks of the children playing at the bottom of the garden rang across the evening air. A pair of oil drums, cut open in half, rested on trestles, wood fire lapping away at their insides. Lamb chops and coils of sausages were smoking away on the grill. The farmers were Boers, blunt-faced and blunt-spoken, but affable once we got to know them. The meat of the gossip that evening – and chewed over and over into gristle throughout the district that summer, I would discover – concerned a wealthy middleaged Englishman and his beautiful young wife who had moved to Beaufort West from London the previous summer. Well, one of these days, then,’ said Robert. ‘The old girl’s quite the expert on our island’s history, Willie. Knows everything about the place. Used to give our friends from abroad tours of the town. We showed that German writer around when he was in Penang – what was his name, dear? Hesse, wasn’t it? Yes. Hermann Hesse.’

The second point of view is the voice of W Somerset Maugham, the writer who spent most of his life away from Britain writing his own fiction about people he met on his travels. a b Lea, Richard (14 March 2013). "Tan Twan Eng wins Man Asian prize". The Guardian . Retrieved 15 March 2013.Masquerade: The Lives of Noel Coward by Oliver Soden, Homer and His Iliad by Robin Lane Fox, and Papyrus by Irene Vallejo.

It was high summer when we arrived, the sun smiting the earth. Everything was so bleak – the parchment landscape, the faces of the people, even the light itself. How I ached for the monsoon skies of the equator, for the ever-changing tints of its chameleon sea. A week after we had settled into our new home we were invited to the farmhouse for dinner. The sun was just burrowing into the mountains when we walked the half-mile there from our bungalow. We had to stop a few times along the way for Robert to catch his breath. Bernard Presgrave was thirty-eight, twelve years Robert’s junior. Robust and ruddy-faced, he reminded me of Robert when I first married him. His farm was called Doornfontein, the Fountain of Thorns, the kind of inauspicious name that would have set my old amah Ah Peng muttering darkly, ‘Asking for trouble only.’ But Bernard and his wife Helena, a placid and dull girl from the Cape, appeared to be prospering. A system of divide and rule helped the British maintain control of the country’s increasingly diverse population while the colonial expatriates lived a world apart, trying to create a little England in the tropics, complete with its clubs, churches and cloying social structures.Admitting the ideas for his own books do not come easily, he is already thinking of what he might write next. There's much to be said about Eng's ability to craft a scene, especially the vivid settings and descriptions of nature. Though the novel as a whole seems to fall into many of the tropes of historical fiction, he does excel in rendering a location or crafting a rich environment within which his characters reside. SHAPIRO: We've talked about what a rich place Penang is, where so many different cultures intermingle. And this story is mostly told from the perspective of the Brits, the British people who live there. What do you think we see by looking at the world through that particular lens?

SHAPIRO: That must make it easier to write about events that happened more than a century ago. You don't have to worry about offending the people you're writing about.Writing for NPR, Heller McAlpin described the work as "a paean to the art of transforming life experiences into literature". With McAlpin further commending Tan's ambitious creativity in interpreting Maugham's works in a new literary piece. [3] Writing for The Financial Times, Michael Arditti describes the novel as "expertly constructed, tightly plotted and richly atmospheric." [4] Canongate, which is based in Edinburgh, Scotland, will also be republishing Tan’s Booker-longlisted debut novel The Gift Of Rain in its "Canons" series this month. It begins and ends in Doornfontein, South Africa in 1947.... with Lesley Hamlin as our narrator. She and Robert moved into a modest bungalow on the property of Robert’s cousin, Bernard, who was a sheep farmer. It was an adjustment for Lesley and Robert …… If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. Tan studied law at the University of London, and later worked as an advocate and solicitor in one of Kuala Lumpur's leading law firms before becoming a full-time writer. [2]