At first glance, Tie Ning’s The Passage of Roses appears to be yet another Chinese novel set during the Cultural Revolution in which bourgeois families and pre-1949 intellectuals are purged and banished. But the unnerving characters of Si Yiwen and her granddaughter Mei, whom Si cares for, influences and later harms, soon promise something different.

Born into wealth in Old China, Si survives under the new regime as a marginal housewife, insignificant enough to avoid persecution. Yet it is precisely this insignificance that piques her desire for recognition. From an early age, she was denied love with a young revolutionary and was then ignored by her husband and in-laws. Now she finds herself drawn to the political fervour like a moth to a flame. She invites revolutionaries to dig up her family treasure and later to occupy her house: she even witnesses their subsequent murder of her sister-in-law and provides information that jeopardises her own sister – all in return for greater visibility in the community propaganda group. Her ruthlessness is not imposed by ideology but is a desperate attempt to assert a long-repressed sense of self-worth.

Si’s moral degradation is recorded through the innocent eyes of Mei, from first childhood to her early teens. The girl is observant, but unable fully to understand what is happening. Initially when Si seems unreasonable and opinionated – scolding the five-year-old for holding chopsticks the wrong way or simply for standing too close to the dinner table – we try to find some redeeming justification and hope for belated tenderness. Instead, we grow increasingly alarmed as abuse sets in. Eventually, when Si contrives for the 14-year-old Mei to walk in on a sex scene between her widowed aunt and a young man the girl has a crush on, we realise quite how twisted the grandmother’s mind has become.

Beijing in the 1970s is vividly rendered: the jujube trees, the shadows in the alleys, the sound of the peddlers. As we absorb the details of Mei’s everyday life, we become increasingly aware of a home that has emptied out: love has been replaced with calculation, trust with schemes and care with jealousy. And, like Mei, we may need a long time to recover.

Among contemporary Chinese novels with a similar subject matter, The Passage of Roses offers a rare focus on femininity as something distorted and sabotaged by overriding ambition and opportunism.