A child sold by her mother, a vast tyrannical Chinese household, lecherous monks and benevolent gods, not to mention a handsome heir: Catherine Lim's fourth novel has all the ingredients of an utterly trashy read. Set in Singapore in the 1950s, a little girl - Han - is sold, aged four, as a bondmaid, a slave, to the House of Wu, where she grows up and falls in love with the heir. Her life is not easy: she struggles against the family's traditions, dodges the grasping hands of lusting male relatives, is often beaten and suffers for the exceptional freedom her relationship with the young heir, Wu, gives her. Her jealous fellow bondmaids dole out the most degrading tasks and spite by the spleenful. She stays silent because, whatever happens, she still has Wu. So when he grows up and his rank inevitably splits the young friends, Han is devastated and cannot come to terms with her loss. It is amazing Lim gets away with such over-the-top tosh, and the explanation has to lie in the fact that Han's story is only a little of what this book has to offer. Lim has come up with a deeply felt, superbly conveyed insight into Chinese life and culture. She gives her readers a deft weaving of Asian superstitions, myths and legends, an exploration of Eastern corruption and decadence, and of the value systems of the time that allowed such injustice. Lim, a Malaysian who lectures in applied linguistics in Singapore, has a thousand and one subplots on the go here. That sort of dexterity becomes particularly powerful when combined with the ability to create convincing characters and an understanding of passions. What does it mean not just to love but to waste your efforts, to have hopes repeatedly dashed, to be overtaken by your dreams? Lim's ability to deal with such emotional subjects, however fancifully, is what essentially sustains The Bondmaid. Also driving the story along is her idea that any idyll is shadowed by the darker side of human morality. Han's relationship with Wu - always impossible and deeply forbidden - is essentially a brother-sister relationship nurtured by an intense understanding of each other's thoughts and needs, and by the brutish lives surrounding them. It is a relationship with more than a hint of incest. And it is typical of this theme that Han's mother is capable of one of the greatest acts of cruelty - abandoning her daughter - but, equally, has been capable of maternal tenderness. Even Han has her darker depths. Dumped in the Wus' gloomy reception hall, she is unsettled to the point of devastation. Everything she does is overdone; everything she feels, intemperate. The hovel Han leaves behind, overwhelmed by children, fleas and a thug of a father the mother does nothing to control, is not much to cry about. Yet Han does so for days and is given up for dead, saved only by an act of curiosity as much as by kindness from Wu. Everyone wants a piece of her, yet Han reaches a point where she can live with it all. Lim offers Han up as a woman transformed by the power of her passion, rising above her appalling situation. She is finally able to break free because she alone knows how selfless love must be. The Bondmaid by Catherine Lim Orion, $150