The Case is a novel about loss - of memory, of love, of money, of friends. The protagonist searches throughout the book for a suitcase - maybe valuable in itself, maybe because it represents resources and a destination. The novel takes us on a trip through the American dream, of wealth, cowboys Hollywood movies, and out the other side, to police shootouts, mortal danger and revolution, on a quest for the missing case.

The Magnificent Wurlitzer is a modern epic, its theme that of the 'guilty Faust' on a fantastic, grotesque journey seeking his truth, his Mephistopheles. Its hero James (aka Jay, Jayman, Hopper) treads in the traces of epics from East and West, Gilgamesh, the Ramayana, Gotterdammerung, from jazzman to shaman, sliding from music and religion to seeking order where there can be none, to politicking and leadership of the virtual and the voiceless.

Wurlitzer is the machine that plays all music in its own sweet way. It is creation, innovation, improvisation - a farrago-medley of beauty and bad...

The Observatory is a novel about political commitment and liberation. Set in 1968, it reflects the high season of Guevara in Bolivia, and the attempts to insert a revolutionary 'foco' in places where objective conditions are politically ripe, but where the subjective element, and the most rudimentary organisation, are absent.

Guerilla intellectuals, loaded with visionary enthusiasm, arrive like space travellers, igniting the revolutionary straw and engaging armies, but too respectful to damage the traditions and culture of those who are to be liberated ...

The Other Shore focuses on a critical point in Soviet history. It deals with young Soviet intellectuals, bright but not brilliant, confronting a future threatened with war and stagnation, but still with the impetus of post-Stalinist regeneration.

Rather than being a chronicle of the debates between neo-Bolsheviks, Leninists, social and liberal democrats, Trotskyists, Westernisers and traditionalists, it depicts a more modest but more frequently encountered search for commitment, for a meaningful political and social life, in a vast country where light and darkness flicker and alternate...

In three fables, Fraser's The Red Tank presents founding myths and 21st century epics - viewed with a kind of Martian 'taken-abackness'. In our new globalised world, what happens to the little beings, our species, and their allies among the beasts - do they grow, becoming giant, innocent philosophers, or do they go off to rut and runt in the forest?

The human project is once more immense: taming nature, securing peace, creating order. The protagonists are fabulous, easily the equals of ancient gods and heroes. In the first fable, "Chinese Whispers," we try to subdue and measure nature -...

In John Fraser's novel The Storm, three policy experts are at a conference, where their principals are swept away by a storm. One of the experts is held for ransom, but is released in time to join the others as they discuss the new, leaderless, dispensation. They try various strategies to achieve power - the ex-Yugoslav, suspected of war crimes, and possible under-age sexual misdemeanours, proposes infiltrating the bureaucracy, but is unsuccessful. The initiative seems to lie with Melinda, the best-connected expert, who is also an adventurous musician. They consider an incursion into the US,...

Wayfaring, the latest of John Fraser's tour de forces in experimental fiction, consists of three novellas, with the common theme of travelling in difficult places. 'Coming in to Land on Saturn' is the (fictionalised) account of the extreme physical and psychological experiences of a trainee Intelligence operative.

In 'Sometimes the Watchman Is Drunk' four people travel round the ethnically fragmented regions of Southern Yugoslavia before the wars of the 1990s. Faced with the imminence of communist breakup, the four turn to self-inquiry, as the future becomes more troubled and...