By Stephen Dowling BBC News Online entertainment staff

Valerie Martin's book is set in the US deep south

Valerie Martin's Property was the surprise winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction 2003 on Tuesday night, beating Zadie Smith and Donna Tartt.

At the very least, you have to congratulate Valerie Martin on the creation of Property's principal character.

Manon Gaudet is the restless plantation-owner's wife sweltering in the Louisiana heat - a prickly, unhappy woman trapped in a loveless marriage.

She pines for the society of New Orleans, is monstrous to her long-suffering black staff and despises her dull and duplicitous husband.

As leading characters go she is distinctly unlikeable. But you are nonetheless hooked from the very first page due to the situation she is in.

Slave uprising

It is the 1820s, the peak of America's slave days, and Manon's husband is the owner of a slowly failing sugar plantation.

Sugar prices are fluctuating, cholera and yellow fever stalk the land, and rumours are growing of a slave uprising in the area.

Manon's husband has been less than faithful; her servant, Sarah, has borne him a newborn daughter and a wild-haired, profoundly deaf son called Walter, a constant cause of disruption in the house.

Her hatred for husband is also mixed with jealousy over Sarah - a slave girl she had bought with her as a wedding gift - feelings fired up by the racist attitudes of the day.

The book bristles with the injustice of America's slaving past

Ownership is the central theme of the book - Manon is as much the property of her husband (we never learn his name) as the plantation house or the slaves working the fields.

When a death in her family presents Manon with the promise of financial independence, she realises it will only come with the death of her husband.

All the time the threat of slaves on the loose, threatening insurrection, grows ever stronger.

Martin's book is powerfully written, all the more so given its narrator's fully-fleshed personality - just as you're finding sympathy for her, Manon's racism and superiority raise their ugly heads.

She is a slave herself - to the lies and hypocrisy that allow her to believe she is a victim, most of all to her husband.

Martin's prose is fluid and brilliantly descriptive; you can almost feel the close summer air and the rumours of a slave revolt take on an almost physical presence.

This is a quality, southern Gothic drama with a keen sense of the injustice that pervaded American society for so long, and the racial issues that grew up alongside it.