Old China hand STEPHEN LEWIS talks to a young York author whose first novel looks set to go to the top of the bestseller lists.

THE cost of buying a home in London has sky-rocketed so much that teachers and nurses can no longer afford to live there, it is said. Add to that list another profession: the successful author.

Despite making publishing history by securing a £150,000 advance for his then uncompleted first novel The Drink And Dream Teahouse, set in China, Justin Hill was still unable to get a mortgage in London - until he went back to work in an office, that is.

The writer, who was brought up in York and educated at St Peter's School, gives a wry grin. For years he's been travelling the world, leading a free if hand-to-mouth existence as a VSO English teacher in China and Africa. The moment he hits the big time he finds himself chained to an office as a manager with an Internet firm.

"I've been back at work since November," the 29-year-old admits. "It will pay my mortgage until hopefully the book takes off. But it will be for as short a time as possible!"

At the time he landed his book deal last summer, Justin was still a penniless student working on his MA in creative writing at Lancaster University (he passed). Before that, he'd spent most of the previous seven years working in China and Eritrea.

"I'm not used to having money," he says cheerfully when we meet up in Little Bettys Tearooms in Stonegate. "I've never had any! But hopefully I don't think it will change me."

Actually, he insists, the huge advance for his novel did not catapult him into the rich league.

"The money comes in four instalments," he protests. "And half of it goes in tax straight away!"

He pauses, before adding darkly: "Just because they have given me a big advance doesn't necessarily mean it is going to be successful!"

There's an element of modesty here: within the first few days, his book had already sold half of its initial print run of 5,000 - phenomenal for a first novel by an unknown author.

To a certain extent, he's cashing in on the latest literary fad. There is, he admits, an enormous appetite for books about modern China. Several previous books have become best-sellers - Jung Chang's Wild Swans and Adeline Yen Mah's Falling Leaves among them.

Those were written by Chinese people, and were essentially autobiographical accounts of growing up in a country convulsed by revolution and change. Justin's book is different: not only is it a novel, it's a novel about China, featuring Chinese characters, but written by an Englishman.

Isn't it a little over-ambitious, I ask, to try to put yourself in the minds of Chinese people?

He's unrepentant. "Culture really is skin deep," he says, sipping a cup of peppermint tea. "People get obsessed with the differences: but what is universal is so much more important. People say my characters are very vivid, very real - and why shouldn't they be, just because they are Chinese?"

His book tells the story of a group of ordinary Chinese people struggling to come to terms with life in the Chinese town of Shaoyang after the local state-run fireworks factory closes as a result of the country's economic modernisation.

Party Secretary Li commits suicide as the world he has known is turned upside down - but not before showing his despair at the way his country is going by daubing slogans on to sheets of rice paper and hanging them outside his house.

Old Zhu, the staunch Communist founder of the factory, spends his days tending his allotment and hoping for the return of Da Shan, his son. Old Zhu's neighbour, Madame Fan, stands on her balcony singing snatches of Beijing opera while her beautiful daughter Peach, a thoroughly modern Chinese miss, dreams of falling in love.

It's a surprisingly rich gallery of characters for a first novel - many of them, Justin admits, based on people he knew, both in China and over here. Having dipped into the book, I can attest to its authenticity. Many of the characters spring vividly to life - and they do remind me of people I knew when I lived in China myself. And somehow, although the book is written entirely in English, the language in which the characters speak manages to capture the rhythms and cadences of spoken Chinese. As a Chinese speaker myself, I could find myself hearing in my head as I read the actual Chinese words Justin's characters would have said. It's almost as though he wrote the dialogue in Chinese first, then translated it into English.

The book looks set to be a winner - and hopefully, through reading it, we'll all learn a little more about the most populous nation on Earth.

"People in Britain have really absolutely no idea what life in modern China is like," Justin says. "There are 1.2 billion people in China - a quarter of the world's population - so that's really quite worrying.

"We have all the little fashion accessories, the feng shui, but it's really time that we woke up a bit and took a more serious look." His book just might help us do that.

The Drink and Dream Teahouse is published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, price £12.99.