Critics have called Hon Lai-chu called "the most outstanding young author in Hong Kong." Her clean, absurd and abstract style is often compared to Franz Kafka. Her intensely psychological stories often reflect her characters' inner struggles for freedom, against the futility of attempts to find meaning in everyday existence. She has won numerous awards, including the Hong Kong Biennial Award for Chinese Literature for fiction, Taiwan's Unitas New Writer's Novella first prize, and the Hong Kong Book Prize. Her books have twice been named to the list of Top Ten Chinese Novels Worldwide, in 2008 and 2009. She was a 2010 resident at the University of Iowa International Writing Program.

A patient escapes from an asylum, to spend his life as the perfect mannequin in a department store display; when living alone is outlawed, a woman who resides quietly with her cat is assigned by bureaucrats to a role in an artificially created "family;" a luckless man transforms himself into a chair so people can, literally, sit on him. These are just a few of the inhabitants of Hon Lai-chu's stories, where surreal characters struggle to carve out space for freedom and individuality in an absurd world. The Chinese version of The Kite Family won the New Writer's Novella first prize from Taiwan's Unitas Literary Association, was one of 2008's Books of the Year according to Taiwan's China Times, was selected as one of the Top 10 Chinese Novels Worldwide, and was awarded a Translation Grant from the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts.