Lemn Sissay is a British-Ethiopian poet, broadcaster and chancellor of Manchester University.

He was born in 1967 to an unmarried Ethiopian mother, who was then studying in England.

While it was standard practice for children such as Lemn to be quickly adopted out, his mother refused to sign him away.

Even without her consent, Sissay notes that "the Authority" was able to farm him out to a foster family, the Greenwoods. The Greenwoods gave Sissay a measure of love and stability.

Then when he was on the cusp of adolescence, they rejected him. Their breathtaking cruelty is a mystery, even at the book's end.

Sissay was a handsome and extroverted child who outshone his young brother, Christopher. This, and some minor infringements of the family's strictly religious code of good and evil, meant that he was on borrowed time.

At age 12, he was manipulated into admitting that he didn't love his foster parents. They were then able to demand that he be immediately removed from their care.

For the next five years, he would struggle to retain his sense of self as he cycled through a series of Orwellian institutions.

The memoir is interspersed with extracts from Authority records about Sissay as a baby, child and youth.

In these, he is judged, analysed and decisions made about him. With the stroke of a pen, his name is changed from Lemn, to Norman.

Whenever someone outside the system applauds his intelligence, the Authority swiftly responds, rejecting suggestions that the boy is anything but ordinary.

The four institutions Sissay tumbles through, and especially the nightmarish Wood End juvenile prison, seem designed to break the will of the children within.

Poetry becomes a life raft for Sissay. His beautifully turned quatrains open each each chapter, serving as antidote to the bleak world he describes.

Each poem is a small, still pond, reflecting the tumultuous events which follow. The opening poem is worth replicating:

I am the bull in the china shop

With all my strength and will

As a storm smashed the teacups

I stood still

The rage, cruelty, chaos and ultimately restraint in this poem point to the grace and triumph of this writer, and his extraordinary tale.