The stone door cover

The stone door

by Leonora Carrington

After the enthusiastic reception accorded The Hearing Trumpet ("This is the best book I've ever read." - Los Angeles Free Times), Leonora Carrington has now released for publication an even more intense tale of fantasy and love. Written at the end of World War II and only now published in its original English edition, The Stone Door is an inspired, phantasmagoric journey into a wildly surreal world. The novel is an omen, an incantation, and an adventure story rolled into one. Built in layers like a Chinese puzzle, it is the tale of two people, of love and the Zodiac and the Cabbalah, of Transylvania and Mesopotamia converging at the Caucasus, of a mad Hungarian King named Böles Kilary and of a woman's discovery of an initiatory code that leads to a Cyclopean obstacle, to love, self and awareness, to the great stone door of Kescke and beyond... As impossible to describe as it is to put down, The Stone Door establishes once and for all that the author has no peer in the realms of fantasy or black humor.

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Chappie’s discussion starters

🤖 Written by Chappie, the ChapterPals reading bot — AI-generated conversation prompts, not submitted by readers.

  1. Which character stayed with you after you turned the last page, and why?
  2. Was there a moment where you disagreed with a character’s choice? What would you have done?
  3. What theme did this book keep circling back to — and did it earn its ending?
  4. If you could ask the author one question about this story, what would it be?
  5. Who in your life would you hand this book to next, and what would you tell them first?