Although she's authored other books, Valerie Mason-John, also known as Queenie, has just published her debut novel, Borrowed Body, to great acclaim. Mixing elements of autobiography, fantasy and gritty reality, it's a book that few will forget in a hurry.

So who's Valerie? Mason-John is a genre-defying playwright, actor, author, journalist, performance poet, and presenter. Mason-John's books have been concerned with identity. Her non-fiction discussion Lesbians Talking: Making Black Waves was an anthology of writings by lesbians of black or Asian descent living in Britain.

In 1998 she published Brown Girl in the Ring, a mixture of prose, drama and storytelling about her life as a black lesbian living in 90s Britain. Throughout the 90s Mason-John also authored a number of plays, including Sin Dykes, about SM, and the children's fantasy The Adventures of Snow Black and Rose Red.

Borrowed Body is also a book about identity and fantasy. It concerns Pauline, a young black girl, who is reincarnated and born to a mother who doesn't want her. Pauline finds herself being looked after at Dr Barnardo's Village in Essex and shunted between various foster families. As she grows up, Pauline's birth mother, known as Wunmi, comes to take her away.

Living together in a block of flats, Wunmi tries to dominate Pauline's spirit and mould her into a dutiful African child. Meanwhile Pauline has discovered the delinquent delights of shoplifting and glue-sniffing, until she gets caught, that is, and is forced to face the harsh realities of life.

Mason-John was herself was Barnardo's kid, and her own life as a troubled teenager seems to share many parallels with her novel. But she denies that Borrowed Body is an autobiography. In an interview with GaydarNation she explained: "Like most first novels I've used part of my life as a catalyst to tell a story. If Pauline had lived a 'normal' life with her parents, people wouldn't be saying autobiographical. I am a writer and artist, and to be that one must enter the world of imagination and fantasy."

Borrowed Body takes a child's view of the world. There have been a number of recent books written from the point of view of a troubled child, including Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and Jonathon Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. But Mason-John's protagonist is not a precocious (white) boy and she manages to convey the sheer terror and confusion of being powerless in the world in an authentic and frightening manner.

Woven into the grit is a sense of spirituality and fantasy, Pauline has angel and spirit companions, who help and hinder her way, and this magic realism that heightens the book's feeling.

Borrowed Body is a shocking and powerful book. A share of the profits from its sales will be donated to Barnardo's.

Read our interview with Valerie Mason-John.

Borrowed Body by Valerie Mason-John
Published by: Serpent's Tail
ISBN: 1852428910

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