The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng (2023) opens in South Africa in 1947 as the painter Lesley C Hamlyn recalls Penang, Malaya, in 1921 when she met William Somerset Maugham, one of the greatest British writers of the 20 th century. English writer Evelyn Waugh said Maugham’s disciplined writing was never boring nor clumsy. American playwright Lee Wilson Dodd said, “Mr. Maugham knows how to plan a story and carry it through. Competence is the word,” but he added that his style is “without a trace of imaginative beauty.” Nevertheless, it was his short stories that garnered the most praise with writers acknowledging that some would surely become immortal. Born in the British Embassy in Paris, Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) lived in the city for the first ten years of his life before his family moved back to England. He returned to France for his last years, dying in Nice at the age of 91. This book is neither about his early years, nor his long life and legacy. From her home in So