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It deserves every reader it can get.The reviewer co-wrote the ‘Rough Guide to Books for Teenagers’. The world’s most famous steam engine will be seen regularly on Britain’s railway network again after the Flying Scotsman was saved from sale abroad at a cost of £3.6m. He is also the victim of a thought-system that believes that only a son can carry on the all-important spirit of any family.The author was born in China in 1952, and was orphaned at 13. Three years later, as the daughter of a once admired but now despised former factory-owner, she was sent to a prison farm for six years.

She eventually married and had a baby daughter whom she was forced to leave when she defected to Canada aged 35. She soon found her voice, first as a children’s writer and then as the author of a compelling fragment of autobiography, A Leaf in the Bitter Wind.Her troubled background also makes its way into this novel, which is dedicated to the daughter with whom she has now been able to renew contact after another difficult search.Written with assistance from her second husband, the Canadian author William Bell, her story is both shocking and elegiac. The real enemies are shown to be poverty, over-population and a feudal, authoritarian tradition that all too easily shades into modern political corruption.Old Revolutionary Chen, Dong-mei’s grandfather, does not come over as a bad man, despite his murderous intentions towards his first granddaughter As village Party Secretary he is fair and hard-working. No wonder peasant girls used sometimes to join hands and jump to their death into the nearest lake as an alternative to a marriage.The quest for true identity has made for dramatic reading ever since the first myths. It is equally so here, as Dong-mei gradually closes in on the local patriarchal set-up that had once driven her biological mother mad with grief But there is no self-righteous, Western-based anger. While life for a male Chinese peasant comes over as almost unbearably hard, the lives of their consorts seem even harder. Her parents always insist she recognise her Chinese origins, including learning to speak Mandarin.

After a long period of denial, she finds herself at 18 longing to return to find her mother.Told from a variety of viewpoints, this story shows how every character played their part in her tragedy. Its beauty is in contrast to the harsh reception awaiting a baby girl born to a Chinese peasant family longing for a son, but by government decree only allowed one offspring
Dong-mei is adopted by a liberal Canadian couple and grows up in Milford, Ontario. The baby’s name is Dong-mei, which means “Winter plum-blossom”. This is in order to prevent the infant’s “accidental” death at the hands of her father or grandfather. Far from being thrown away, the baby girl at the centre of the story is deliberately placed by her mother on the steps of a Chinese orphanage.

As with most of her oeuvre, the batting average is not high, but it’s certainly consistent To 15 May (020-7565 5000). The title of this fine novel is misleading. The complacency of that, from a middle-ranking dramatist like Gilman, is a bit rich.Some very good actors are trapped in a play where they have to remain within crisp outlines. To add any subtext would be fatal in a piece where every effect is calculated to within an inch of its life.