The Door

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 *
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 *
One of Hungary’s most important twentieth-century writers * New York Times *
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 *
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 *
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
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 *
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