PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Tan Twan Eng was born in Penang, Malaysia. His debut novel The Gift of Rain was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2007 and has been widely translated. The Garden of Evening Mists won the Man Asian Literary Prize 2012 and the 2013 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012 and the 2014 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.The House of Doors is his third novel.@tan.twan.eng
An amazingly transporting novel about love, desire and duty. The House of Doors does what the very best stories do - it draws us into many fascinating worlds at once: the British Empire's incursions into South-East Asia; the secret life of one of England's finest writers; a forgotten murder trial playing out in the Kuala Lumpur courts a century ago. Weaving all this together with great skill and power, bringing the reader a surfeit of pleasure, Tan Twan Eng also teaches us a crucial lesson: never trust a writer -- JONATHAN LEE, author of JOY A book that believes instinctively in the beauty of language, in the ability of the sentence to transport us; we get to luxuriate in every description, live inside every image -- ANDREW McMILLAN Praise for The Garden of Evening Mists: It is impossible to resist the opening sentence of this sumptuously produced novel . . . it showcases Tan Twan Eng as a master of complexities * * Guardian * * Complex and powerful . . . sophisticated and satisfying * * Sunday Times * * Elegant and atmospheric * * The TImes * * Tantalisingly evocative . . . Suffused with a satisfying richness of colour and character, it still abounds in hidden passageways and occult corners. Mysteries and secrets persist. Tan dwells often on the borderline states, the in between areas, of Japanese art: the archer's hiatus before the arrow speeds from the bow; the patch of skin that a master of the horimono tattoo will leave bare; or the beautiful and sorrowful moment just as the last leaf is about to drop . . . An elegant and haunting novel of war, art and memory . . . its beauty never comes to rest * * Independent * * A beautiful, dark and wistful exploration of loss and remembrance that will stay with you long after reading * * Daily Telegraph * * With ravishing sensuousness, it conjures up the lush landscapes and tea estates of Malaya during the 1950s Emergency, as reflections on Japanese aesthetic refinements in gardening and art intersect with recollections of Japanese wartime atrocities in a haunting novel about memory * * Sunday TImes * * The layering of historical periods is intricate, the descriptions of highland Malaysia are richly evocative, and the characterisation is both dark and compelling. Guarding its mysteries until the very end, this is a novel of subtle power and redemptive grace -- MAYA JAGGI, chair of the Man Asian Literary Prize judges
