Global Perspectives Book Club "The House of Doors"

Wednesday, June 11, 2025 @ 6pm 

Global Perspectives is a group devoted to exploring history and looking at diverse perspectives through fiction.  The program is held monthly on the 2nd Wednesday of the month from October 2024-June 2025 at 6pm in the Carnegie Library meeting room. We alternate between discussing a book one month to viewing a movie the next month throughout the series. Be sure to join our Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/globalperspectivesbookclub or email arobertson@munpl.org if you would like to join our email list.

This Month's Book:

This month, we will read The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng, a novel set in Malaysia during the 1920s.

Synopsis from Goodreads:

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.