The Blue Door - Tapa dura

"This novel is a delicately beautiful exploration of the confusion in human relations: what lies, unrealised, behind the door of an individual's conception of self." (Nadine Gordimer)

The Blue Door is built around one of the oldest questions in storytelling: What if ...? What if I return home one day to find, behind a familiar door, an unfamiliar world? What if the people closest to me turn out to be strangers? What if strangers start claiming a place in my life I cannot imagine? What if the memories of the most important moments in my life can no longer be trusted? What if I am not who I think I am?
David le Roux, a teacher recently turned fulltime artist, returns to his studio one afternoon to find his whole familiar world turned upside down. The woman who opens the door and welcomes him as her husband is a complete stranger to him: beautiful and loving, but not the wife he assumes he has been married to for nine years. The children are overjoyed at his return, but he has never set eyes on them before. And when he goes back to the building he believes he lives in, it no longer exists. Has everything in his life been illusion? Or is the past real and only the present a hallucination? In a country like South Africa these questions may decide a whole life.
Instead of living with the consequences of early choices he now discovers that behind every choice made lurks the possibility of innumerable other choices not made.
What if, indeed ...?