#WWWWednesday – 24th May 2023

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WWWWednesdays

Hosted by Taking on a World of Words, this meme is all about the three Ws:

  • What are you currently reading?
  • What did you recently finish reading?
  • What do you think you’ll read next?

Why not join in too?  Leave a comment with your link at Taking on a World of Words and then go blog hopping!

Currently reading

The Scarlet PapersThe Scarlet Papers by Matthew Richardson (eARC, Michael Joseph via NetGalley) 

VIENNA, 1946: A brilliant German scientist snatched from the ruins of Nazi Europe.
MOSCOW, 1964: A US diplomat caught in a clandestine love affair as the Cold War rages.
RIGA, 1992: A Russian archivist selling secrets that will change the twentieth century forever.
LONDON, THE PRESENT DAY: A British academic on the run with the chance to solve one of history’s greatest mysteries.

Their stories, their lives, and the fate of the world are bound by a single manuscript. A document feared and whispered about in capitals across the globe. In its pages, history will be rewritten. It is only ever known as . . . THE SCARLET PAPERS

The devastating secrets contained within teased by a brief invitation: Tomorrow 11AM. Take a cab and pay in cash. Tell no one.

AncestryAncestry : A Novel by Simon Mawer (Little, Brown) Shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2023

The past is another country and we are all its exiles. Banished forever, we look back in fascination and wonder at this mysterious land. Who were the people who populated it?

Almost two hundred years ago, Abraham, an illiterate urchin, scavenges on a Suffolk beach and dreams of running away to sea… Naomi, a seventeen-year-old seamstress, sits primly in a second class carriage on the train from Sussex to London and imagines a new life in the big city… George, a private soldier of the 50th Regiment of Foot, marries his Irish bride, Annie, in the cathedral in Manchester and together they face married life under arms. Now these people exist only in the bare bones of registers and census lists but they were once real enough. They lived, loved, felt joy and fear, and ultimately died. But who were they? And what indissoluble thread binds them together?

Simon Mawer’s compelling and original novel puts flesh on our ancestors’ bones to bring them to life and give them voice. He has created stories that are gripping and heart-breaking, from the squalor and vitality of Dickensian London to the excitement of seafaring in the last days of sail and the horror of the trenches of the Crimea. There is birth and death; there is love, both open and legal but also hidden and illicit. Yet the thread that connects these disparate figures is something that they cannot have known – the unbreakable bond of family.

Recently finished

For the first time in a long time – absolutely nothing. Too much needing to be done in the garden! 

What Cathy (will) Read Next

Sister of MineSister of Mine by Laurie Petrou (eARC, Verve Books) 

Two sisters. One fire. A secret that won’t burn out.

The Grayson sisters are trouble. Everyone in their small town knows it. But no-one can know of the secret that binds them together.

Hattie is the light. Penny is the darkness. Together, they have balance.

But one night the balance is toppled. A match is struck. A fire is started. A cruel husband is killed. The potential for a new life flickers in the fire’s embers, but resentment, guilt, and jealousy suffocate like smoke.

Their lives have been engulfed in flames – will they ever be able to put them out?

#BookReview #Ad The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng @canongatebooks

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The House of DoorsAbout the Book

It is 1921 and at Cassowary House in the Straits Settlements of Penang, Robert Hamlyn is a well-to-do lawyer and his steey wife Lesley a society hostess. Their lives are invigorated when Willie, an old friend of Robert’s, comes to stay.

Willie Somerset Maugham is one of the greatest writers of his day. But he is beleaguered by an unhappy marriage, ill-health and business interests that have gone badly awry. He is also struggling to write. The more Lesley’s friendship with Willie grows, the more clearly she sees him as he is – a man who has no choice but to mask his true self.

Format: eARC (320 pages)              Publisher: Canongate
Publication date: 18th May 2023 Genre: Historical Fiction

Find The House of Doors on Goodreads

Purchase links
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My Review

I loved both of Tan Twan Eng’s previous books – The Gift of Rain and The Garden of Evening Mists – but, boy, has he made us wait a long time for his next one. It’s been well worth the wait though because The House of Doors is absolutely brilliant. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it pop up on the longlist for next year’s Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.

Set in Penang (the author’s birthplace) and moving beween 1910 and 1921, it’s an intimate and nuanced portrait of the complications and consequences of relationships that must remain clandestine, such as that between Willie Somerset Maugham and Gerald Haxton, nominally his secretary but actually his lover.

The book opens in 1947 as Lesley Hamlyn, living on a remote farm in Doomfontein, South Africa, receives a package containing a copy of the book, The Casuarina Tree by W (Willie) Somerset Maugham. It evokes memories of the author’s two week stay in 1921 with her and her late husband, Robert, at Cassowary House, their former home in Penang. It was a place Lesley loved and was reluctant to leave but did so out of a mixture of loyalty to her husband, and despair. The book also has another significance for Lesley, one which the reader will only discover in the moving final chapter of the book.

Willie arrives in Penang in 1921 weakened by sickness from his travels through the Far East and beset by money troubles, a situation he fears may scupper his relationship with Gerald who has become used to a luxury lifestyle. In order to restore his finances, he needs to find material for his next book. Willie and Lesley form an immediate bond, both being in marriages that provide a form of cover from society gossip and speculation.  Lesley begins to unburden herself to Willie, sharing details of a secret relationship that took place ten years earlier as well as her involvement with charismatic Chinese revolutionary, Sen Yat-Sen (a real life figure).  She also reveals her connection with a (real life) murder case that scandalised the British inhabitants of the Straits Settlement and the Federated Malay States.

Willie uses her recollections as material for the stories in The Casuarina Tree. Reading the published book, and in particular the story ‘The Letter’, Lesley observes that ‘He had woven it into something that was familiar to me, yet also uncanny; factual, but at the same time completely fictional.’  Tan Twan Eng has harnessed the same writer’s instinct to blend historical fact with fiction in order to create this wonderful novel.

Those who have read Tan Twan Eng’s previous novels won’t be surprised that there is wonderful descriptive writing that really brings to life the bustling streets of the ‘real’ Penang, i.e. the Penang that the white residents don’t see. There is also a wonderful scene in which Willie and Lesley go for an evening swim. ‘That night, side by side, we drifted among the galaxies of sea-stars, while far, far above us the asterisks of light marked out the footnotes on the page of eternity.’ Gorgeous.

The House of Doors of the title is an actual place in the novel but is also a metaphor for things that must remain hidden, often things more wonderful than the plain facade shown to the outside world.

I received an advance review copy courtesy of Canongate via NetGalley.

In three words: Assured, intimate, moving

Try something similar: The Chosen by Elizabeth Lowry

Tan Twan EngAbout the Author

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. (Photo: Publisher author page)

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