The House Of Doors by Tan Twan Eng

This is like a Russian doll, a story within a story within a truth, and all woven together and very well told. I found this because it was long-listed for the Booker Prize (and in my opinion, which is never asked for nor heeded, it is better than a number of those that made the short list) and is a wonderful story. Some events have been changed to suit the story, but the true part goes like this. Ethel Proudlock took her husband’s revolver and shot a man dead at her house in Malaysia in 1911. She claimed the victim, William Steward, had arrived unannounced and attempted to kiss her. But her trial pointed to a deeper story, one that lifted the lid on the culture that spawned it. She was a member of Kuala Lumpur’s expat community, a conservative outpost nicknamed Cheltenham-on-the-Equator. Her rumored infidelity, combined with her concealed mixed-race background, made her a pariah and in a surprising turn of events, she was found guilty. This widely known scandal would later be refitted to form the basis for The Letter, an acclaimed short story by W Somerset Maugham, who makes an appearance in this book as a house guest of Robert and Lesley Hamlyn in Penang--he is a world famous author at the time, but he is also on the downhill side of his career, with quite a few skeletons in his closet to keep hidden. The book is a meditation on how and why we tell stories, but it’s also a political saga of sorts, charting Lesley’s journey towards self-empowerment and embrace of social activism, a window into when and where and how colonialism loses its attraction as well as its glitter.