The Blue Door Book

What if . . . ?

The Blue Door is built around one of the oldest questions in storytelling: What if...? What if I returned home one day to find, behind a familiar door, an unfamiliar world? What if the people closest to me turned out to be strangers? What if strangers started claiming a place in my life I couldn’t 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 full-time 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 an 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.