I am drawn to what lies beneath ordinary lives: the silences within families, the private explanations people construct for themselves, and the ways love, loyalty, and disappointment reorder how we move through the world.
Writing is a discipline through which I give form to experience. My work often begins in fragments—notes carried over from a day, a walk that does not resolve, questions that refuse to settle. On the page, these fragments gather, not into certainty, but into a shape that can hold them.
My fiction moves through psychological interiority and the shifting boundary between perception and truth. I am interested in the distance between what is lived and what can be spoken.
Born in Malaysia and educated in the United Kingdom, I have lived across Southeast Asia and the United States. Working across languages, I remain attentive to the ways meaning shifts in transit, and to how people recognize themselves within the stories they inhabit.
Current Project
Literary novel: Kingdom of the Mind: Slipaway Land
Completed manuscript • 80,000words
Logline
A childhood act of escape into an imagined rainforest kingdom becomes a private mythology that sustains a man into adulthood—until the life he has built begins to reveal the cost of believing it.
Brief Description
The Kingdom of the Mind: Slipaway Land follows Karl Levine, who as a boy retreats into an imagined forest kingdom in response to humiliation.
As an adult—disciplined and outwardly successful—he carries that private mythology into marriage and fatherhood, until it begins to surface beyond his control.
After his marriage collapses, Karl returns to Borneo with his young son, seeking the origin of the story that has come to shape his life.
The novel stands alone, with scope for a broader multi-generational narrative tracing how a family’s private mythology evolves over time.
Comparable Titles
For readers drawn to the restrained interiority of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant and the psychological reckoning of Ian McEwan’s Atonement.
About the Author
Grace Lim is an interdisciplinary artist and novelist whose work moves between visual and narrative forms. Her practice engages perception, interior life, and the narratives through which experience is shaped and understood.
The manuscript is available upon request. Representation inquiries are welcome.
