The Binding Chair offers up a captivating brew combining the turbulence of turn-of-the-century Shanghai, Russia, London, and 1920s Nice, weaving back and forth in place and time in the lives of a rich cast of characters, all of whom are dominated by the imperious May. As the beautiful and treasured child Chao-tsing, her feet had been bound at five—a brutal fettering of body and heart—and dutifully prepared for marriage by 14. Beaten and humiliated as fourth wife to her silk merchant husband, she escapes by literally piggybacking to Shanghai, renouncing her past. Renaming herself as May, her search for freedom leads her to the dubious door of Madame Grace's where May's only proviso is "Chinese I won't touch".

In the years that follow she swiftly acquires English and French, great swathes of Flaubert's Madame Bovary and William Defoe, a habit for opium, and the devoted Arthur, foot fetishist to the last. As Mrs Arthur Cohen, May enters an extended Jewish household where she sees that its losses—of children, including May and Arthur's own Rose; of the devotion of her unruly niece, Alice; and ultimately of even their home—are heavier than its fabulous gains, built on wartime futures' markets.

In her chosen escape to Nice after the terrible influenza of 1919, taking what is left of her Cohen family, May comes to know that it is still "her feet that held her between one world and the next: balanced between East and West, China and Europe, misery, happiness".

Kathryn Harrison engagingly displays a wealth of research, binding the intricacies of Chinese and Caucasian customs and manners, the realities and myths of historical background, with the daily turmoil of all her characters. If occasionally the rush of events subsumes emotional content, there is still terrific pleasure in the felicitous writing and inventiveness of plot. —Ruth Petrie