The Door

''A deeply strange and equally affecting book, a dark domestic fairy tale'' New York Times 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. TRANSLATED BY LEN RIX

About the author

Magda Szabó was born in 1917 in Debrecen, Hungary. She began her literary career as a poet. In the 1950s she 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 in 1978 was awarded the Kossuth Prize, the most prestigious literary award in Hungary. Magda Szabó died in 2007.

Product details

• Authors: Magda Szabo, Magda Szabó
• Assisted by: Len Rix (Translation), Rix Len (Translation)
• Publisher: Vintage UK
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Release: 16.04.2026
• EAN: 9781529940190
• ISBN: 978-1-5299-4019-0
• No. of pages: 272
• Dimensions: 129 mm x 198 mm x 15 mm
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), FICTION / Literary, Fiction in translation, Modern and contemporary fiction: general and literary