The Bondmaid
Catherine Lim
Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Editions, 2011
ISBN: 9789814346207

This remarkable novel tells the moving story of Han, aged four and the youngest daughter of an impoverished family. Sold as a slave into the House of Wu, she quickly forms a close bond with the young heir, but the idyll of childhood attachment quickly turns into a nightmare of frustrated passion as Han reaches her teens - beautiful, proud and in love with the young master. Her life becomes a struggle against the forces of tradition and tyranny in a world where lustful male relatives use bondmaids for indiscriminate pleasure, visiting monks devise ingenious schemes to combine holy public duty with unbridled private indulgences, and gods and goddesses with careless insouciance, smile to see the human drama unfold.

At once a power study of domestic and sexual slavery and a deeply disturbing and radiantly uplifting story, The Bondmaid captures the special ethos of a wealthy and powerful Chinese household in an era of beauty and brutality and chronicles one love - right to its astonishing climax.