Recently, Marion Drolsbach — translator extraordinaire for The Heir of Night — recommended The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng, which she has (also recently) translated into Dutch.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to secure a copy of The House of Doors yet. But fortunately, a local library was able to supply a copy of The Garden of Evening Mists, also by Tan Twan Eng, which won the Man Asia Literary Prize and Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction in 2013, as well as being shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize. So I have very good hope that this will prove an equally good starting point for reading the author’s work. 🙂

Tan Twan Eng is a Malaysian author whose work has been critically acclaimed and widely translated. The Garden of Evening Mists was his second novel and is set in Malaysia during the World War Two period and the Malayan Emergency of the ca. 1950s.

The book has also been made into a film.

The Independent called it an “elegant and haunting novel of war, art and memory.” In terms of what more I can say without having read it myself yet ( 😀 ), the following is derived from the back cover synopsis:

“On a mountain above the clouds in the central highlands of Malaya, lived the man who had been the gardener of the Emperor of Japan.

As the months pass, Yun Ling finds herself intimately drawn to the gardener and his art, while all around them a communist guerilla war rages. But the Garden of Evening Mists remains a place of mystery. Who is Aritomo and how did he come to leave Japan? And is the real story of how Yun Ling managed to survive the war perhaps the darkest secret of all?”

Audio book

It sounds like a very interesting story, so together with Marion’s recommendation for the author’s most recent novel, I am looking forward to reading it.