Guo's 2005 autobiographical novel, "Village of Stone" focuses on two people, Coral and Red, who live together in Beijing, and how Coral's life changes one day when she receives a dried eel in the post, an anonymous gift from someone in her remote home village. Doris Lessing spoke highly of the book in 2004: "Reading it rather like finding yourself in a dream." "The Times Literary Supplement" praised the novel: "The language has the pared-down simplicity of a fable; the effect is a bit like that of a Haruki Murakami novel."