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 fictionalized version of William …more Somerset Maugham. The novel was longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize and listed among notable fiction works in 2023 by The Washington Post and The Financial Times.
The house behind every door has a story and a door often represents transitions, changes or opportunities. Curiosity to unravel what is behind the door makes us embrace even the unfamiliar.

The book was inspired by Somerset's Play The Letter, which was also made into a film.

The whole story takes place in Penang, Malaysia. Lesley is the wife of a lawyer named Robert. Robert and Willie(Somerset Maugham ) are friends. They invite Willie over to their house. Lesley starts telling Willie about Sun Yat Sen and Ethel Proudlock, which in turn helps him write great books. Robert warns Lesley that she shouldn’t tell Willie about personal incidents as they could chance upon the stories in one of his books. The story unfolds revealing a lot of secrets, deceit, homophobia, infidelities, political turmoil, concealed sexuality, and gender bias. The book prominently highlights the problems faced by gay people in that era.
I felt that Lesley was the most prominent character in the book, though the book is about Somerset Maugham.

Its a layered novel with narratives moving between Willie and Lesley.I thought that the whole idea of weaving a story around this author is brilliant.
On the night of 23 April 1911, Ethel Proudlock took her husband’s revolver and shot a man dead at her house in Malaysia. She claimed the victim, William Steward, had arrived unannounced and attempted to kiss her. But her trial pointed to a deeper story, one that lifted the lid on the culture that spawned it. Proudlock was a member of Kuala Lumpur’s expat community, a conservative outpost nicknamed Cheltenham-on-the-Equator. Her rumoured infidelity, combined with her concealed mixed-race background, made her a pariah. The killing was seen as almost the least of her crimes.

The Proudlock scandal would later be refitted to form the basis for The Letter, an acclaimed short story by W Somerset Maugham, that pitiless chronicler of so much human frailty. It now provides the prompt for Tan Twan Eng’s The House of Doors, an ambitious, elaborate fiction about fictions that beats back to the humid heyday of empire and installs the bestselling author as a flawed player in the drama. “We will be remembered through our stories,” Maugham declares at one point. He speaks with the bland self-assurance of a man who invariably writes the final draft.

In print, on the page, Maugham presented himself as anonymous and dispassionate; a confidante in the shadows recording the confessions of others. The truth was more knotty. At the time of his travels through the Federated Malay States, he was borderline bankrupt, in flight from a sham marriage and accompanied by his rackety lover, Gerald Haxton. Tan takes the famous writer – “Willie” to his friends – and folds him amid the transplanted high society of Penang, a guest at the home of well-to-do Robert and Lesley Hamlyn. Lesley disapproves of Maugham’s lifestyle but sympathises with his plight. It is she who will tell him what befell Ethel Proudlock (less)