The Door by Magda Szab
Emerence is a domestic servant – strong, fierce, eccentric, and with a reputation for being a first-rate housekeeper. When Magda, a young Hungarian writer, takes her on she never imagines how important this woman will become to her. It takes twenty years for a complex trust between them to be slowly, carefully built. But Emerence has secrets and vulnerabilities beneath her indomitable exterior which will test Magda’s friendship and change the complexion of both their lives irreversibly.
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Improbably, you lose your heart and head to [The Door], which somehow cuts to the quick of everything that matters and does so in a voice which is, at the same time, materially straightforward and intensely hypnotic -- Simon Schama * Financial Times *
Szabó manages to conjure up as many cliffhangers as an Indiana Jones filmThe Door is a triumph. Clever, moving, frightening, it deserves to be a bestseller -- Tibor Fischer * Daily Telegraph *
One of Hungary’s most important twentieth-century writers * New York Times *
The Door is a deeply strange and equally affecting book, a dark domestic fairy tale about the relationship between a Hungarian writer, Magda, and her taciturn elderly housekeeper, Emerence * New York Times *
No brief summary can do justice to the intelligence and moral complexity of this novel. I picked it up without expectation. I read it with gathering intensity, and a swelling admiration. I finished it, and straightaway started to read it again. It is unusual, original and utterly compelling * Scotsman *
Szabó manages to conjure up as many cliffhangers as an Indiana Jones filmThe Door is a triumph. Clever, moving, frightening, it deserves to be a bestseller -- Tibor Fischer * Daily Telegraph *
One of Hungary’s most important twentieth-century writers * New York Times *
The Door is a deeply strange and equally affecting book, a dark domestic fairy tale about the relationship between a Hungarian writer, Magda, and her taciturn elderly housekeeper, Emerence * New York Times *
No brief summary can do justice to the intelligence and moral complexity of this novel. I picked it up without expectation. I read it with gathering intensity, and a swelling admiration. I finished it, and straightaway started to read it again. It is unusual, original and utterly compelling * Scotsman *
Magda Szabó was born in 1917 in Debrecen, Hungary. She began her literary career as a poet. In the 1950s she was silenced and disappeared from the publishing scene for political reasons and made her living by teaching and translating from French and English. She began writing novels, and went on to win many literary awards, including the Attila József Prize in 1959 and 1972, and the Kossuth Prize, the most prestigious literary award in Hungary, in 1978. Szabó’s novel, The Door, was originally published in Hungary in 1987, and Len Rix’s translation has gone on to win the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Magda Szabó died in 2007.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781784876401 |
| ISBN 10 | 1784876402 |
| Title | The Door |
| Author | Magda Szabó |
| Series | Vintage Editions |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Vintage Publishing |
| Year published | 2020-09-03 |
| Number of pages | 320 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |