'Outstanding . . . The House of Doors again displays [Eng's] talent for atmospheric evocation of place and period . . . Beautifully detailed and encompassing the vagaries of Maugham's life, the contours of his creativity and the personal and political tensions covertly quivering through the sultry colony around him, The House of Doors is a finely accomplished piece of work'
- Sunday Times
'Fascinating, engrossing and has given me infinite pleasure'
- Colm Tóibín, Guardian
'A tremendous feat of literary imagination. Highly evocative, richly observed and entirely convincing, it is a tour de force!'
- William Boyd
'Expertly constructed, tightly plotted and richly atmospheric'
- Financial Times
'Sex, scandal and Somerset Maugham . . . an elegant meditation on oppression, repression and loneliness . . . The House of Doors pays tribute to storytelling itself as a means not just of memorialising, but recreating . . . imbued with quiet yearning, this a pleasurably old-fashioned novel'
- Daily Telegraph
'Perfectly poised . . . a fascinatingly layered novel . . . Through this deceptively lulling atmosphere, Twan has woven a superb, quietly complex tale of love, duty and betrayal'
- Literary Review
'If any book is going to beat Tan Twan Eng's The House of Doors to the Booker Prize, it'll have to be very good indeed'
- Philip Pullman
'What elevates Eng's book is the sheer beauty of his writing - restrained, elegant, precise, every detail accurate, every line considered. Pain, loss and disappointment seep from every page, as do beauty and compassion . . . Tan Twan Eng resides in the very top row'
- Times Literary Supplement
'A pleasure to read . . . Tan's style is formal, quiet, sedate but alive with detail'
- John Self, The Critic
'This is Twan's third book, and he just keeps getting better. He is a somewhat spiritual writer, with a love of gardens, but the stories are always about the brutal consequences of ethnic strife, revolution,and war. The combination is mesmerising'
- Ken Follett, The Week