Books like The House of Doors
In 1921 Somerset Maugham, ill and in debt, stays with an old friend and his wife Lesley in Penang, and Lesley tells him about her past, including her part in Sun Yat-sen's revolution and a scandalous murder trial that gripped the colony.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The House of Doors
The Paris Wife
Hadley Richardson, a shy twenty-eight-year-old from St. Louis, marries the young Ernest Hemingway after a whirlwind courtship and sails with him to Paris, where among the expatriate writers of the 1920s their marriage comes under strain.
The Home and the World
During the Swadeshi movement in Bengal, Bimala, the wife of a liberal landowner, steps out of the women's quarters and falls under the spell of his charismatic friend Sandip, a nationalist leader.
The Garden of Eden
A young American writer and his new wife honeymoon on the French Riviera in the 1920s, where her games with haircuts, tans and gender, and then the arrival of another woman, test the marriage and his work. Published long after his death.
The Garden of Evening Mists
Yun Ling Teoh, a judge who survived a Japanese labour camp, goes up to the Cameron Highlands in 1951 to ask Aritomo, once gardener to the Emperor of Japan, to make a garden in memory of her sister.
The Gift of Rain
Philip Hutton, the half-English son of a Penang trading family, becomes the pupil of Hayato Endo, a Japanese diplomat, in the years before the Japanese invasion of Malaya.
A Passage to India
An English woman, a Muslim doctor, and a British magistrate collide in colonial India, and a young woman's accusation in a cave exposes the fissures of empire.
Waiting
Lin Kong, an army doctor in China, goes home every summer to ask his peasant wife from an arranged marriage for a divorce so he can marry a nurse, and every year she agrees and then changes her mind in court.
Troubles
In 1919, Major Brendan Archer, shaken by the war, arrives at a crumbling hotel on the Irish coast to see the fiancée he barely remembers, and watches the building, and the empire, fall apart around him.
Tender Is the Night
An American couple on the French Riviera watches their marriage disintegrate under the weight of alcoholism, infidelity, and the impossibility of recovering the past.
Heat and Dust
A young Englishwoman travels to India to find out what happened to her grandfather's first wife, Olivia, who in 1923 left her husband for an Indian prince.
The Makioka Sisters
Four Osaka sisters of a declining merchant family try across the late 1930s to marry off the third, as the culture they came from is about to be burned off the map.
The Fraud
The housekeeper and cousin-in-law of a fading Victorian novelist becomes obsessed with the Tichborne trial, where a butcher claims to be a lost aristocrat and a formerly enslaved man testifies for him.