The title story of this collection is one of the most haunting pieces of short fiction in the English language. Lionel Wallace, a rising politician, has spent his adult life suppressing a memory from boyhood: a door in a white wall that opened onto a garden of extraordinary beauty, where he was genuinely happy. He chose duty, career, the respectable path. Years later, haunted by what he abandoned, he searches for that door again, desperate to return. H.G. Wells wrote this before his science fiction made him famous, and it shows a different kind of genius: restrained, melancholic, devastating. The collection also includes "The Country of the Blind," in which a sighted man finds himself in a land where his gift is treated as madness, and other tales of ordinary lives disrupted by the extraordinary. These are stories about the weight of conformity, the paths not taken, and the询orrows of growing up. They linger.
