He wrote A Stranger in The Earth and The Confessions of Mycroft Holmes: A Paper Chase, for which he won the Somerset Maugham Award in 2002.

He is the elder son of the American travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux and his then-wife Anne Castle.

But during his research, he became convinced that the world faced a global problem on a scale so serious that an expansion of nuclear energy is probably the best solution (choosing the lesser evil).

He reached this conclusion partly in response to his interviews with several experts, such as Gerhard Bertz of the insurance agency Munich Re, who said that during the past 20 years, payments for natural disasters have increased by 500 percent.

In the programme he explored the country's post-Soviet problems, including population decline, the growing AIDS epidemic, and the persecution of the Meskhetian Turks.

On 16 March 2009, Theroux presented In Search of Wabi-sabi on BBC Four, as part of the channel's 'Hidden Japan' season of programming.

In 2017, he presented a documentary for Unreported World which explored the social and economic consequences of the recent rise in Orthodoxy and Russian nationalism under Vladimir Putin.