Book Box Choice 3

1. This is a bimonthly subscription (shipped every two months)
2. Each Box will include 1 fixed book (chosen by us), 1 book of your choice, and a Bookish Gift – something special and delightful.
3. This is a bid to encourage you to purchase books from book lovers instead of from soulless conglomerates.

The Door by Magda Szabó

The writer Claire Messud, in a review in The New York Times, says about Magda Szabó's The Door: "...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."

For our first ever Book Box in India, the fixed book had to be a lot of things; it would be the Indian reader's introduction to Boxwalla, after all. Hungarian writer Magda Szabó's The Door is everything. Szabó is one of our favorite writers ever, and if this is your first time reading her work, we're thrilled to introduce you to a writer who can change how you think about literature, or as Messud above, even alter the way you understand your own life.

The Door is the story of two women: the first is a writer, a fictionalized version of Szabó, and the other her housekeeper, Emerence. The latter remains a mystery for much of the book, though the narrator tries her best to discover her secrets. She has a formidable reputation as a housekeeper, and even at her old age, her strength is tremendous. Animals love her and people rely on her, even if they may be a bit afraid of her.

The novel is dominated by the author's interest in her housekeeper. Over twenty years, the women's relationship grows, ruptures, and deepens. But as the narrator achieves success as a writer and Emerence's secrets are revealed, the fault lines that emerge in their relationship could be devastating.

First published in 1987, this edition is a fresh, prizewinning translation by Len Rix.

My Friends by Hisham Matar

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize winner and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Hisham Matar is in a position so few are: a contemporary author working at the peak of his power. The evidence? His latest novel, My Friends. The Washington Post describes it as “a profound celebration of the sustaining power of friendship, of the ways we mold ourselves against the indentations of those few people whom fate presses against us.” It is also a story of exile, of the loneliness and longing that accompany it. 

The first page begins with a farewell, and you can feel the twinge of parting on every page. Matar's words make you live in his world. Of our memories which torment and comfort us, of friendships long ended but still haunting us, of a world in which we have aged and things have changed, of the irrevocable sense of loss and exile we have all felt...My Friends is a devastating meditation on friendship and family, and the ways in which time tests—and frays—those bonds.

In Hisham Matar's My Friends, one evening, as a young boy growing up in Benghazi, Khaled hears a bizarre short story read aloud on the radio, about a man being eaten alive by a cat, and has the sense that his life has been changed forever. Obsessed by the power of those words—and by their enigmatic author, Hosam Zowa—Khaled eventually embarks on a journey that will take him far from home, to pursue a life of the mind at the University of Edinburgh.

There, thrust into an open society that is miles away from the world he knew in Libya, Khaled begins to change. He attends a protest against the Qaddafi regime in London, only to watch it explode into tragedy. In a flash, Khaled finds himself injured, clinging to life, unable to leave Britain, much less return to the country of his birth. To even tell his mother and father back home what he has done, on tapped phone lines, would expose them to danger.

When a chance encounter in a hotel brings Khaled face-to-face with Hosam Zowa, the author of the fateful short story, he is subsumed into the deepest friendship of his life. It is a friendship that not only sustains him but eventually forces him, as the Arab Spring erupts, to confront agonizing tensions between revolution and safety, family and exile, and how to define his own sense of self against those closest to him.

Magda Szabó (1917–2007) was born in Debrecen, north-eastern Hungary. She was raised in a devout Protestant and intellectual family. After graduating from the University of Debrecen as a teacher of Latin and of Hungarian, she worked as a teacher and in the Ministry of Religion and Education. Szabó began her writing career as a poet, during which time she came in contact with the New Moon Group who defined poetry of that generation in Hungary. Her second collection, Back to the Human, was awarded the Baumgarten Prize, one of Hungary's most prestigious literary awards. However, the award was taken away the same day as Szabó was declared an enemy of the people by the recently installed communist party. She was fired from the Ministry the same year. Banned from publishing, Szabó turned to fiction, defying the guidelines of Social Realism laid down by the State and writing about what she referred to as “terrible women”.