The Door

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 *

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.