Beginning as a short story writer, Penang-born Catherine Lim has been Singapore's most widely read author, thanks partly to her first two books of short stories, "" (1978) and "Or Else, The Lightning God and Other Stories" (1980). These two books were incorporated as texts for the GCE 'O' Levels. Lim's themes of Asian male chauvinistic gender-dominance mark her as a distant cousin to Asian-American writers such as Amy Tan. She has also been writing novels, such as "The Bondmaid" (1998) and "Following the Wrong God Home" (2001), and publishing them to an international audience since the late 1990s.