
The Door
Magda Szabo(Author)
Vintage Classics (Publisher)
Published on 3. September 2020
Book
Paperback/Softback
320 pages
978-1-78487-640-1 (ISBN)
Description
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.
Elegant, pocket-sized paperbacks, VINTAGE Editions celebrate the audacity and ambition of the written word, transporting readers to wherever in the world literary innovation may be found.
Elegant, pocket-sized paperbacks, VINTAGE Editions celebrate the audacity and ambition of the written word, transporting readers to wherever in the world literary innovation may be found.
Reviews / Votes
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 * Szabo manages to conjure up as many cliffhangers as an Indiana Jones film. The 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 * Suffice it to say that I've been haunted by this novel. Szabo's lines and images come to my mind unexpectedly, and with them powerful emotions. It has altered the way I understand my own life -- Claire Messud The Door has been waiting for us for more than sixteen years. It has just opened * Livres Hebdo * In The Door, Hungary's most famous living author, Magda Szabo, gives a rare insight into the precarious relationship between the "lady writer" and her woman who does...The Door is a valuable document of a vital relationship. -- Elena Seymenliyska * Guardian * A superbly controlled and involving work of art * London Review of Books * 'With Frau Szabo, you have caught a golden fish. Buy all of her novels, the ones she is writing and the ones she will write' -- Herman HesseMore details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Vintage Publishing
Product notice
Paperback (UK-A)
Dimensions
Height: 179 mm
Width: 114 mm
Thickness: 35 mm
Weight
220 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-78487-640-1 (9781784876401)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Magda Szabo
The Door
A hauntingly beautiful literary classic on female friendship from twentieth-century Hungary
E-Book
02/2012
1st Edition
Vintage Digital
€8.99
Available for download
Persons
Magda Szabo 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 Jozsef Prize in 1959 and 1972, and the Kossuth Prize, the most prestigious literary award in Hungary, in 1978. Szabo'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 Szabo died in 2007.