A young writer, struggling for success, employs an elderly woman called Emerence to be her housekeeper.From their first encounter it is clear that Emerence is no ordinary maid.Although everyone in the neighbourhood knows and respects her, no one knows anything about her private life or has ever crossed her threshold. Only a great drama in the writer's life prompts Emerence to unveil glimpses of her traumatic past - a past which sheds light on her peculiar behaviour. The Door brilliantly evokes the development of the bond between these two very different women, and the tragic ending to their relationship.

**'A dark domestic fairy tale' New York Times

A young writer employs a housekeeper - and slowly finds herself the sole keeper of the older woman's sercrets.**

Magda is a writer, Emerence her housekeeper. Magda is new to their quiet Hungarian town, while Emerence, fierce and enigmatic, knows and is known by all. Though Emerence enters Magda's home whenever she pleases, the door to Emerence's own strange abode remains barred. Still, somehow, over the course of twenty years, an intimate trust is built between the two, rich with shared confidences.

Yet when this trust is betrayed one dark afternoon, the pair's complex relationship will be left forever altered, and Magda will find herself haunted until the end of her days.

For not all doors are made to be opened.

'A bone-shaking book' New Yorker

Translated by Len Rix

Vorwort
A powerful, haunting novel about an unlikely friendship by Hungary's most important twentieth-century writer.

Autorentext

Magda Szabó 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 József Prize in 1959 and 1972, and the Kossuth Prize, the most prestigious literary award in Hungary, in 1978. Szabó'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 Szabó died in 2007.

Klappentext

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.

Zusammenfassung
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.