FICTION: As the Earth Turns SilverBy Alison Wong, Picador, 272pp. £7.99

WONG CHUNG-SHUN arrived in New Zealand intent on making a life. He opened a fruit-and-vegetable store. In time, Yung, his bright if careless younger brother, joined him. “When Yung first arrived we did not recognise each other. We had not seen each other for over ten years. He is eighteen now, and books have affected his brain. He dreams big, impossible dreams. He does not understand life, and he does not understand this land.”

These observations made by a man who says very little are prophetic in the robust yet delicately told debut of the New Zealander Alison Wong. It is an impressive novel, all the more so for being one that could easily be dismissed as lightweight because of its romantic title and cover design. A single sentence on the jacket dispels such doubts, however: it won the Janet Frame Award for Fiction and earlier this week was included on the longlist for the 2011 International Impac Dublin Literary Award.

The Chinese community in Wellington is isolated and subjected to racial attacks. The locals jeer at the “foreigners” and their customs, most of all; they resent their hard work and diligence. The brothers absorb the tensions. Meanwhile, also isolated is Katherine McKechnie, an unhappy young mother of two. Marriage to Donald, a sarcastic reporter on the local newspaper, is miserable; he constantly finds fault with her housekeeping. Katherine is a strong character whose subversive sense of humour balances her many regrets. Wong evokes a home in which the father has mesmerised the son, Robbie, an unpleasant young fellow with no interest in his studious sister, Edie, a little girl fascinated by science.

Wong has a good story to tell, and releases the information slowly; the narrative is brilliantly plotted, moving between the initially unconnected lives of the Chinese brothers and a bickering married couple heading for tragedy. Katherine is uneasy about the influence her husband has over their son, but she is also concerned about how different, even eccentric Edie is. She almost fears the child’s intellect. “It was easier not to think. Or feel. Perhaps intelligence was not a blessing. More a test of character.”

Busy in the kitchen, preparing a meal, Katherine slices an onion; she thinks about her daughter. “She saw her daughter’s face, the long curls of red hair, a scattering of freckles over her upturned nose, her big hazel eyes. She sliced the bottom from the onion and her eyes watered. Once she’d looked like that too. Like her daughter.”

Donald meets a suitably squalid end, leaving Katherine alone with two very different children and little money. The Chinese brothers are meanwhile balancing the difficulties of dealing with racism in their adopted country with their need to remain close to the homeland.

The characterisation is superb. Katherine as the central character is convincing and well supported by the way the randomness of her thoughts and daydreams is described. Wong is an exact, precise writer with a feel for fluid observation and concrete, deliberate images. There is nothing forced or sentimental about a novel that could easily have slid into both.

Katherine experiences generous support from Mrs Newman, a wealthy local who not only gives her a job but also notes Edie’s academic ability and promises to help. Later it is this shrewd, often righteous employer who advises Katherine about the potential dangers she is risking through her furtive new relationship.

The romance, which develops out of sympathy, and could have proved a weakness in the narrative, is sensitively handled by Wong, who develops her characters as real people, at the mercy of society and in need of comfort and contact. The element of threat surrounds the relationship at every stage, even in the early days when Katherine leaves the house at night. Contrasting cultures are central to the story, but there is more to it than that: Wong is exploring the imagination and how it works.

Years pass and the children grow up and move ever farther away; Edie becomes a medical student and Robbie sets off to fight in the Great War. Katherine is portrayed as a mother who barely knows her children, but she remains sympathetic. The ambivalence she feels for her son Robbie is effectively suggested. At many crucial moments Wong displays inspired restraint, never explaining too much.

As the Earth Turns Silveris a novel about longing, yet it is motivated primarily by anger, particularly that of Robbie: "Every day for months on end he went to the gym and punched the heavy bag as if his life depended on it, aiming for an imagined face on the leather. Sometimes it was the moustachioed face of the Kaiser; sometimes, when he thought of his mother, it was the squint-eyed face of the Chow." A crime that goes undetected ends up changing several lives.

Late in the narrative Katherine watches her son, damaged by the war and so much else: she offers him a piece of pineapple, and the gesture reminds him of an appalling act. “Afterwards he looked out at her with hollow eyes, arms loose by his side. Everything so loose, barely held together, almost as if his body had forgotten the meaning of muscle, ligament, bone.”

In Katherine, Wong has created a wife and mother who never forgets that she is a woman and a person. Excited by her unexpected second chance at love, she is bereft at her abrupt loss of it: “Grief comes softly behind her.” Events take place leaving only an aftermath. There is an unusual intelligence about this subtle, crafted novel that forces one to stop and absorb the enormity of the smallest gesture.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times