Listen free for 30 days
Listen with offer
-
The House of Doors
- Narrated by: David Oakes, Louise-Mai Newberry
- Length: 11 hrs and 15 mins
Failed to add items
Add to basket failed.
Add to wishlist failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
£0.00 for first 30 days
Buy Now for £17.99
No valid payment method on file.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Summary
LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
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.
Critic reviews
"One of this year's finest novels is also one of its most satisfying audiobooks.... David Oakes narrates the chapters in the third person, which depict author W. Somerset Maugham's visit to Penang in 1921 with his secretary and lover, Gerald Haxton. In alternating chapters, Louise-Mai Newberry narrates a first-person account by his hostess Lesley Hamlyn, which describes a 1911 murder trial that will become Maugham's story "The Letter".... Both narrators are outstanding as they convey atmosphere, character, and the author's postcolonial perspective with confidence and sensitivity." (AudioFile; winner of AudioFile Earphones Award)