Born in Kuala Lumpur, Chan Ling Yap was educated in Malaysia and the UK. She has a PhD in economics and was Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Malaya and then Senior Economist and Secretary of the Intergovernmental Group on Rice in the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations in Rome. She now lives in the UK.

Her novels New Beginnings and Where the Sunrise is Red, won the Readers Popular Readers' Choice Award (Malaysia) in 2014 and 2019 respectively, while both Sweet Offerings and Bitter-Sweet Harvest were shortlisted for the award.

The four novels, Sweet Offerings, Bitter-Sweet Harvest, New Beginnings and A Flash of Water, form a quartet, which traces the lives of one family against the turbulent political, economic and social changes in China and Malaya. Each, however, stands on its own.