May 1, 2023

Broke, floundering creatively, and miserable in a marriage of convenience meant to hide his homosexuality, Somerset Maugham traveled to Malaya after World War I, where he met Lesley Hamlyn and her lawyer husband, Robert. Tan takes this real-life event and stitches together a narrative featuring Maugham's bonding with Lesley and a secret she shares about events during the Chinese Revolution. From the Man Booker short-listed, Man Asia Prize--winning Tan. Prepub Alert.

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August 1, 2023
A historical novel about W. Somerset Maugham's sojourn to Malaysia and the secrets he discovered there. Eng's third novel is mainly set in 1921, when the globe-trotting, world-famous author of Of Human Bondage visited the coastal province of Penang. He's a guest in the sizable home of Lesley and Robert Hamlyn, a married British couple with a frosty relationship, and "Willie" is soon determined to figure out what's under the ice. (It's a useful distraction from learning he's lost his life's savings in a bad investment.) Lesley, we learn, was once close to the rising Chinese leader Sun Yat Sen; she was also a close friend of Ethel Proudlock, a woman who stood accused of murder, killing a man who attempted to rape her. (Maugham would use Proudlock's sensational trial and other elements of his Malaysia trip as fodder for his 1926 story collection, The Casuarina Tree.) Alternating between Lesley's and Willie's perspectives, Eng tracks two inveterate gossips busily uncovering years' worth of seductions, infidelities, marriages of convenience, and other secrets. (Willie's status as a closeted gay man is a key part of the story, and he's not the only one in the closet.) The title refers to a refuge Lesley finds where she might imagine becoming "a different woman, living a different life." Yet for a story so suffused with matters of sex, violence, and long-running resentment, the novel operates at a surprisingly low boil and is mannered almost to a fault. Some of that effect is a tactic, Eng evoking Maugham's subdued style in understated revelations of secret lives, and the writing is graceful and well-researched. Still, the novel at times labors to capture the passions that consume its characters' lives. A restrained look at a society working to keep up appearances.

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Starred review from August 7, 2023
Tan (The Garden of Evening Mists) explores the power of storytelling in this intoxicating outing. At Cassowary House in Penang, Malaya, in 1921, Lesley Hamlyn prepares to receive “Willie” Somerset Maugham, the famed English writer and friend of her husband, Robert. Increasingly drawn to Willie—who is desperate for new material for a novel to stave off bankruptcy—Lesley gradually unburdens herself to the author, unearthing a trove of long-buried secrets ranging from the personal to the political. Tan seamlessly merges fact and fiction as he explores the underlying tensions in both Lesley and Willie’s marriages, as well as Lesley’s intriguing involvement with the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat Sen during his 1910 sojourn in Penang. A side plot involves Lesley’s friend Ethel Proudlock, another real-life figure, who stood trial for the murder of her fellow Englishman in Kuala Lumpur. As in Tan’s other works, the narrative dwells on memory and loss, its lush, dreamy prose evoking the bygone days of colonial pre-WWII British Malaya amid musings on life’s ephemeral nature, while never losing its eye for injustice: “For a woman to be remembered,” Lesley laments, “she has to either be a queen or a whore. But for those of us who lead normal, mundane lives, who will remember us?” This is a stunner. Agent: Jessica Woollard, David Higham Assoc.

Starred review from September 1, 2023
Here's what's real: Ethel Proudlock stood trial for murder in Kuala Lumpur; Chinese nationalist Sun Yat-Sen found support in Penang in 1910; W. Somerset Maugham visited the Federated Malay States in 1921 with his secretary/companion Gerald Haxton and later published The Casuarina Tree, which closes with "The Letter," based on the Proudlock case. How an obscure murder becomes a sensational short story by arguably the most famous writer of his time is the premise of Malaysian author Tan's third exquisite title, following the Man Asia Literary Prize-winning The Garden of Evening Mists (2012). To reveal those layers, Tan creates Robert and Lesley Hamlyn of Cassowary House in Penang who welcome Robert's dear old friend Willie, as Maugham was known to his intimates, into their home. "Watch what you say to Willie," Robert warns Lesley, "there's nothing he loves more than snuffling out people's scandals and secrets." Tan takes on a behemoth task here: combining sensational fact and intimate fiction in a British colonial Asian setting complicated by white privilege, politics, social hypocrisy, gender inequity, racism, homophobia, and more. "All we can ever get is the incomplete picture," Willie quips at Robert. "A writer's job is to fill in the gaps. And he decides how the story ends." Tan succeeds in delivering another intricate literary gift.

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