The Original Daughter is the quintessential Singaporean novel

There are debuts and then there are Debuts. The latter arrives in your hands fully formed and properly lived-in, the product of years of accrued experience and vivid, independent thought.

- Cherie Lok

THE ORIGINAL DAUGHTER By Jemimah Wei Fiction/Weidenfeld & Nicolson/ Paperback/368 pages/$33.95

Much like Arin Yang, one-half of the pair of sisters at the core of Singaporean author Jemimah Wei's The Original Daughter. At age seven, she is dropped into the life of the protagonist, Genevieve, a walking reminder of their grandfather's betrayal.

In exchange for taking on the burden of another child, Genevieve's family gets a peanut butter jar filled halfway with "grey sand." The deal is done, the two cousins now sisters. Grandmother, father, mother and daughters, both original and new, squeeze into a one-bedroom flat in Bedok.

And so, life goes on.

What follows is a quintessentially Singaporean tale: of coming of age in a hot and sweaty concrete jungle, of striving for excellence, of having to recalibrate one's sense of self once cut loose from the institutional weighing scales that assign each student a numerical value. It is the portrait of a little life, illustrated in epic detail.

This staggering, capital D Debut, which took Wei a decade to publish, covers a nearly 20-year period from 1996 to 2015, sliced into 84 eminently readable chapters. In that time, Genevieve and Arin go from uneasy allies to sworn sisters to strangers again.