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'A dark domestic fairy tale' New York Times

A young writer employs a housekeeper - and slowly finds herself the sole keeper of the older woman's sercrets.

Magda is a writer, Emerence her housekeeper. Magda is new to their quiet Hungarian town, while Emerence, fierce and enigmatic, knows and is known by all. Though Emerence enters Magda’s home whenever she pleases, the door to Emerence’s own strange abode remains barred. Still, somehow, over the course of twenty years, an intimate trust is built between the two, rich with shared confidences.

Yet when this trust is betrayed one dark afternoon, the pair’s complex relationship will be left forever altered, and Magda will find herself haunted until the end of her days.

For not all doors are made to be opened.

'A bone-shaking book' New Yorker

Translated by Len Rix

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.