Condemned as "almost pornographic", it has presented school librarians with a dilemma: ignore the latest work by a well-known writer, or risk breaking the law. Nick Morrison talks to the author of the most controversial children's book of the year.

GROWING up in a new town, watching your parents split up, feeling you somehow don't fit in, fantasising about possessing the powers of comic book superheroes - it could almost be a list of ingredients for a teen novel. Throw them in, mix them up, and out comes a book for teenagers.

But for Paul Magrs, it's not so much a recipe as a record of his experience of being ten years old in a new town in the North-East. His 12th novel is his most autobiographical, and also his most controversial. Some people want it banned from schools; some librarians think that putting it on the shelves could see them ending up in court.

"It is about 90 per cent my childhood when I was ten. It is looking back at what was going on that summer, with my mam and dad divorcing, my mam having a new bloke, and the access weekends with my dad," he says.

"And it is living in Aycliffe and going to the school there, and the imagination of a kid at that point. The kid in the book reads Marvel comics and thinks he is different to everyone else. It is that ambiguous time when you are aware of all the things you could become. And he has got this attachment to another boy."

And there's the controversy. Strange Boy features a relationship between the ten-year-old protagonist, David, and 14-year-old John from down the road. There is some sex, but it is not graphic and the theme does not dominate the book, but that has not stopped the calls to stop it being stocked in schools.

The Christian Institute has labelled it "almost pornographic" and unsuitable for school libraries. North of the border, it has made front page news, and a Scottish teachers' leader has condemned it as inappropriate for children and a step too far.

It is also presenting school librarians with a dilemma. It is thought to be the first "gay book" aimed at teenagers since 1988, when the Tory government introduced Section 28, the law aimed at preventing schools from "promoting" homosexuality - and one published by a mainstream publisher - it will be up to individual schools to stock it or not, but they could be breaking the law if they do.

But for the author, the idea of "promoting" homosexuality is absurd, suggesting that gay writers should be somehow barred from writing about their own experiences.

"The two boys start messing about, the way that boys do, but the word "gay" is never mentioned in the book. A lot of experimenting goes on, but that is no different to boys who turn out to be straight.

"It is quite explicit about the way kids behave, like in the changing rooms and showing each other their dicks, that is all there, as well as the way kids talk and swear. Most kids' books don't do that, but I think it is patronising not to.

"There is all this controversy, but I still hold to the truth of it - it is from my life and nobody can argue with that. I think school libraries ought to stock it, because you do look to books for models of ways you might live, but I went through this and there was nothing there for me.

"The Section 28 thing is ridiculous. You can't promote anything - fiction is too rich and complex for that, you can just show life as it is."

As important for the author as the debate over growing up gay, is the depiction of life in Newton Aycliffe in the 1970s. The former Woodham School pupil, now a senior lecturer on the MA fiction course at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, has extensively plundered his County Durham background and childhood for his work.

"The first three novels I published in the 1990s were set on the same estate, and a lot of my fiction is set in Aycliffe and the North-East. It is to do with new-ness," he says.

"A lot of my family lived on Tyneside, but we were somewhere where it was quite grim - well grim is the wrong word - it was little box houses but it was still a place for the imagination to grow. It was still being built, so we played on building sites, and it was still quite rural."

He says writing Strange Boy was as much an act of memory as of imagination, but while many novelists use their own experiences for their early work, 32-year-old Magrs waited until his career was well established. His previous work includes four adult Dr Who books, although Strange Boy is his first novel aimed at teenagers.

'I held off for a long time because it was precious material, and I waited until I had done lots of other things, although there are bits of the other books where autobiography sneaks in. But it took ten years to find the right shape for it," he says.

But despite the controversy, or maybe because of it, he says it has struck a chord, and not just with people who grew up knowing they were gay.

"I have heard from people who chimed in with that experience. I have stuck to the absolute truth and, hopefully, somebody else will see their truth in that as well.

"School was a very unfriendly place, there was lots of bullying. You stand out as different anyway, if you are cleverer and more sensitive, and the term "queer" is always just bandied about as an insult to anybody who is seen as an outsider."

But he still returns regularly to the North-East, to see family in Aycliffe, and last month his reading tour took him to Bishop Auckland Town Hall, where he was reunited with a former English teacher from Woodham.

"She was a massive influence on me - she made it all seem possible, that you could get out into the world. And I always had my mam, telling us I could do whatever I could fix my sights on," he says.

And now he has finally written the story of his childhood, a story he has been turning over for ten years, the worst thing would be if it did not make an impact. But, even without the demands for it to be banned from school bookshelves, it seems there is little likelihood of that.

"It was an amazing feeling writing it, but books have to leave marks on you, you have to love them as a reader as much as a writer. The idea that a book could leave you untouched is pretty bad," he says.

"We have a culture where we just expect light entertainment of novels, but that is not what novels are about. You have got to live through novels and see the world through somebody else's eyes."

* Strange Boy (£7.99) is published by Simon and Schuster