His only novel to date, Something Like a House (2001, Whitbread First Novel Prize), follows the extraordinary story of an English army deserter who ends up in a remote Chinese village during the Cultural Revolution. Experiments in biological warfare, and attempts to test theories of racial superiority, help to shape the novel, but it is the day-to-day near-hallucinatory strangeness of Jim Fraser's life which fascinates the reader and makes this book a journey into an utterly convincing but terrifyingly alien world.