About this item
From the bestselling, Booker Prize-shortlisted author of The Garden of Evening Mists, a spellbinding novel about love and betrayal, colonialism and revolution, storytelling and redemption.. The year is 1921. Lesley Hamlyn and her husband, Robert, a lawyer and war veteran, are living at Cassowary House on the Straits Settlement of Penang. When "Willie" Somerset Maugham, a famed writer and old friend of Robert's, arrives for an extended visit with his secretary Gerald, the pair threatens a rift that could alter more lives than one. Maugham, one of the great novelists of his day, is beleaguered: Having long hidden his homosexuality, his unhappy and expensive marriage of convenience becomes unbearable after he loses his savings-and the freedom to travel with Gerald.
About the Author
Tan Twan Eng was born in Penang, Malaysia. He lives in Kuala Lumpur. The Gift of Rain, his first novel, was Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. It has been translated into Italian, Spanish, Greek, Hungarian, Russian, Romanian, Czech and Serbian.His second and latest novel, The Garden of Evening Mists, was published in September 2012. It has been Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012. Boyd Tonkin in The Independent called it: 'an elegant and haunting novel of art and war and memory...Tan writes with breath-catching poise and grace, linguistic refinement and searching intelligence...His fictional garden cultivates formal harmony -but also undermines it. It unmasks sophisticated artistry as a partner of pain and lies. This duality invests the novel with a climate of doubt; a mood - as with Aritomo's creation - of "tension and possibility". Its beauty never comes to rest.'It has been translated/will be translated into German, French, Italian, Serbian, Spanish, Dutch, Polish, Hungarian, Macedonian, Taiwanese Chinese, Indonesian, Korean, Russian, and Norwegian. The Garden of Evening Mists won the Man Asian Literary Prize in March 2013. In June it won the Walter Scott Prize 2013, from a shortlist of authors which included Hilary Mantel, Rose Tremain, Thomas Keneally, Pat Barker and Anthony Quinn. The Garden of Evening Mists was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2014.
