The Door

For readers who want the modern Hungarian novel that has won the most devoted following abroad.

Why Consider This One

The Door is the book to reach for once you want something with more emotional reach than a single evening’s confrontation. A writer, much like Szabo herself, hires a fierce and secretive old woman named Emerence to keep her house. What follows is a portrait of a relationship that is part love, part war: Emerence rules her employers, hides her past behind a door she never lets anyone open, and slowly becomes the moral center of the book. It is a story about pride, dependence, and the ways we fail the people who matter most to us.

Szabo was one of Hungary’s most widely read novelists, and this is her masterpiece. The English translation by Len Rix won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, and the New York Times Book Review named it one of the ten best books of 2015. It rewards a little more patience than Embers, but it repays it with one of the most unforgettable characters in postwar fiction.

What to Expect

A quieter, deeper novel that builds slowly and then lands like a blow. Much of it is domestic, set among housework, dogs, and small daily negotiations, and yet the stakes feel enormous. Expect a narrator who is often wrong about the woman she thinks she understands, and an ending that reframes everything that came before. Give it fifty pages and it will not let go.