At about the halfway mark through The House of Doors, the protagonist tries to read a W. Somerset Maugham novel and complains about how his stories are “so frequently about adultery and unhappy marriages.” Shortly after, the novel itself then proceeds to go exactly down that same path with yet another unhappy marriage and more adultery—foreshadowing, sure, but also kind of a letdown after the gentle put-down (an in-universe put-down, to be fair) of the cheating spouses plot.

It’s hard to say if author Tan Twan Eng was trying to prove a point, or just having a little fun at the reader’s expense. The main plot of The House of Doors feels a bit underwhelming once all the pieces have been revealed, but only because for all its talk about adultery and unhappy marriages, it could not resist sneaking in just one more infidelity after all the ones that have come before—the one affair that figuratively breaks the camel’s back.

It’s a bit much.

Fortunately, The House of Doors is not just a plot, and to reduce the experience of reading it down to a series of cheating spouses does the whole package a disservice.

The House of Doors takes place in Penang, Malaysia, during two time periods: the 1910s, and the 1920s. The main protagonist is Lesley Hamlyn, a local in most respects, having been born and raised in the country, but also a white European lady—a memsahib, as the residents would say. Half of the story takes place over a two-week period when Lesley’s household plays host to the aforementioned real-life writer W. Somerset “Willie” Maugham. Maugham is a friend of Lesley’s husband, and is the secondary protagonist and point of view.

The other half—the one that happens in 1910—is a story Lesley recounts to Willie over a series of evenings. It includes such escapades as meetings with Sun Yat Sen and his revolutionary movement, a highly publicized (and potentially scandalous) murder trial, and the revelation of the eponymous House of Doors.

All this is told with a distinct colonial Southeast Asian flavor in prose and language that is delightful to read. Tan Twan Eng knows the subject matter well, and weaves historical facts within the fiction with a deft hand. The dialogue is very sharp—laugh-out-loud at times, although this is not a humorous novel—and the writer knows the idiosyncrasies of being multilingual, as most of the characters are. The local Chinese community, for example, is not referred to as stingy. They are kiam siap.

Wonderful imagery populates this novel generously as well: the bustle of a Southeast Asian market street, a trek through a forgotten graveyard to discover forgotten memorials under a banyan tree, and a dreamlike nighttime swim through a sea of phosphorescent water are only some of the visuals that the book describes so well. It’s very much an experience.

Don’t read it just for the plot, then. Read House of Doors because it’s a story with a lot of love for the world and the period that it portrays. Read it for how it handles historical facts and marries them with fiction. The House of Doors is many things, and it’s that specific combination of parts that makes it special.