Dele, Adebayo's fictional alter ego, indulges in a summer of sex, smokes and substances of an increasingly potent order - first in Oxford and then in London. Dele "clocks" and "scopes" the female populations of Oxford and Brixton, working his way through Helena (white and horsey), Cheryl ("his side of coffee-coloured"), and Andria, a white girl with a Jamaican accent who deals in "GBH" and animal tranquillisers. not very alluring, is it? They -" she scrutinises the breasts on display - "look like puddings or blancmanges I don't think it's meant to arouse. It's more that the sexual imagery stands for life which presses on despite... The woman blankly confronting this great curving beak, this is what we live in, the chaos, we have to live among death and disaster and the possibility that our lives will come to nothing..."This uncharacteristically bleak note is interrupted by a trio of coltish young women who have been summoning the nerve to approach Sister Wendy for her autograph.

But I've never felt this world -" she waves a hand: taxis, Union Jacks, sunlight on the Piccadilly flagstones "- as terribly real, because I've got the real world with me, shining through."But still.. I ask what single thing has most influenced her life "Nothing," she says, "No one person or book or event. It's these divisions which are explored in this accomplished first novel, winner of the Saga prize for unpublished black British authors. Diran Adebayo draws on his experiences as a black Oxford graduate, born and bred in London but of Nigerian descent. This, her fourth book on the Tudors, affirms her pre-eminence in the field..

At the beginning of Some Kind of Black, Dele and his friend Concrete- so named because of his talent for head-butting - play a game of blackjack. Having not been able to agree on the rules of the game, the two decide to play by the Queensberry rules in north London and by Concrete's ("Concrete madness") in the south. In the course of the game, Dele discovers that Concrete has "slipped in some new piece of slyness", symbolic of the divisions in the black community. Anne Boleyn's relentless bullying of Mary ensured that her stepdaughter would resent Elizabeth forever. Elizabeth's relationship with her brother was no doubt coloured by their father's preference for boys.