Promotional Information

Elegant, pocket-sized paperbacks, VINTAGE Editions celebrate the audacity and ambition of the written word, transporting readers to wherever in the world literary innovation may be found.

About the Author

Magda Szab was born in 1917 in Debrecen, Hungary. She began her literary career as a poet. In the 1950s she was silenced and 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 went on to win many literary awards, including the Attila J zsef Prize in 1959 and 1972, and the Kossuth Prize, the most prestigious literary award in Hungary, in 1978. Szab 's novel, The Door, was originally published in Hungary in 1987, and Len Rix's translation has gone on to win the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Magda Szab died in 2007.

Reviews

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
*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
*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.
*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*