Just before reading this, since it centers around Maugham's composition of the short story (and subsequent stage adaptation of) The Letter, I not only read both of those, but also rewatched the 1940 Bette Davis film adaptation - and would strongly suggest doing at least one of those before attempting to read this. Lesley missed her garden — the trees she planted - flowers, shrubs, their high ceilings in Cassowary House, her old busy life of the different committees she was on, but with time, she did adjust realizing she no longer cared about those things. Within these layers of the storyline are many different strands. There is the intrigue of the murder trial, insight into Maugham’s life and Sun Yat Sen’s, and the lives of Europeans, Straits Chinese, Malays and others in Penang at this time. The writing is excellent, although I occasionally found descriptive passages a little overdone and convoluted, and it held my interest completely throughout. I thoroughly enjoyed it and the only reason it’s not a 5 star read for me is due to very minor issues such as this.

The doors spun slowly in the air, like leaves spiralling in a gentle wind, forever falling, never to touch the earth.

I have not read Maugham’s The Casaurina Tree. I’m not sure if reading it would have deepened my appreciation for this book. Masquerade: The Lives of Noel Coward by Oliver Soden, Homer and His Iliad by Robin Lane Fox, and Papyrus by Irene Vallejo. The characters, unfortunately, feel a bit hollow, or like playthings for the author to dictate his story through; perhaps because Maugham is a real person and thus there's only so much creative liberty Eng can take with him—or maybe because the emphasis on playing intertextually with Maugham's works overshadowed Eng's own themes and explorations. Ironically, the one character who felt the most intriguing, Ethel, is the one we only hear about occasionally and mostly at the end of the novel.

Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger. I think she’s an underrated writer and should be more widely known. Her shifts of time and viewpoint (the two often happening simultaneously) are seamless and masterful. A person dies in the final scene in Moon Tiger, but Lively doesn’t describe it. All the reader senses is that something has depleted from the room in the nursing home, and that something is… life. And yet… life still goes on. The lie of each relationship exposes its suffocating function as an instrument of establishment soft-power. Lesley, clever, refined and bored, is also drawn to the egalitarian spirit of the Chinese political movement that intends to overthrow the imperial Manchu dynasty.

How perfectly this house of doors seemed to reflect the story being told. No direct way through it but one that is navigating step by step. The heart of the story is told by Lesley each evening in retrospect as she tells it to Maugham over their evening drinks alone in the garden. She reveals secrets no one else has ever known and the reader listens along with Maugham to her beautiful but heart-breaking story.