THE HOUSE OF DOORS

313pp., paperback, Reprint, Edinburgh, (2023) 2024

Novel set in Penang, Malaysia. Prologue and epilogue set in the Karoo, South Africa, in 1947.

In 1921, at Cassowary House in the Straits Settlements of Penang, lawyer Robert Hamlyn and his wife Lesley a society hostess, invite Willie Somerset Maughan, an old friend of Robert's, to stay with them.

Tan Twan Eng was born in 1972 in Penang, Malaysia, grew up in Kuala Lumpur, studied law through the University of London, and later did a Master's degree in law at the University of Cape Town. He currently divides his time between Kuala Lumpur and Cape Town.

He is the author of the novels The Gift of Rain and The Garden of Evening Mists (winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize 2012 and the 2013 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012).