The Door
  • Published: 3 November 2020
  • ISBN: 9781784876401
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $29.99

The Door

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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.

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.
  • Published: 3 November 2020
  • ISBN: 9781784876401
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $29.99
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About the author

Magda Szabó

Magda Szabó was born in 1917 in Debrecen, Hungary. She began her literary career as a poet. In the 1950s she 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 in 1978 was awarded the Kossuth Prize, the most prestigious literary award in Hungary. Magda Szabó died in 2007.

portrait photo of Magda Szabó

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Praise for The Door

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

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

Szabó 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

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

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

One of Hungary’s most important twentieth-century writers

New York Times

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

A superbly controlled and involving work of art

London Review of Books

'With Frau Szabó, you have caught a golden fish. Buy all of her novels, the ones she is writing and the ones she will write'

Herman Hesse

'The Door has been waiting for us from more than sixteen years. It has just opened'

Livres Hebdo

'In The Door the Hungarian Magda Szabó cleverly guides her intense and poignant novel, allowing the tension to rise in a crescendo'

Madame Figaro