Stephen Lewis talks to a young novelist who has been painting York black.

KAT Pomfret's debut novel is set in a small northern city with a viking museum, quaint cobbled streets and an overpowering weight of history.

Sounds familiar? Given that part of the 27-year-old's later childhood was spent in York - and the fact that her mum still lives here - it should.

There is one overwhelming difference between the city in Kat's novel and the York of her young adulthood, however. In her novel, the city boasts Paradise Jazz - a nightclub where "myths became legends and legends took off their coats and played the kind of blues to leave blisters on your soul".

Despite the best efforts of joints such as Fibbers and el Piano, our quaint, historic city has never managed a club, bar or eatery a fraction as cool or a jot as scorchingly laid-back.

The Paradise is a blues/ jazz club that could have been lifted straight out of America's deep south, black clientele and all.

There's Sanderson Miller, who oozes dangerous charm. There's Jimmy, the blues guitarist who despite hailing straight out of Africa dances like a white man, "his hips stiff and knees straight... and his weight held high in his body". And there's Georgetown Easy, the larger-than-life black girl with attitude to match and a killer way with a narrative. Studying the "beautiful badness" of Miller across the smoky bar of the Paradise, she muses: "I looked at Sanderson Miller and I felt the blood flow thick through me the way it forgot to in this old place."

It is a little unsettling, even in a novel, to find a place like this in a city like York. It's a bit like seeing a staid, corset-wearing white grandmother walking arm-in-arm down the street with a laid-back black dude in an enormous floppy hat.

There are two main characters in Paradise Jazz (apart from the nightclub itself). One is Georgetown (named after her birthplace, Georgetown in Texas). The other is Helena.

Georgetown is black, vibrant and vivid, filling the book with the colourful rhythms of black speech. Helena is white, and comes across as rather uptight, inspid and dull. Which is odd. Because Kat herself is white, and yet it is the black characters and the black world in her book which are most alive and vibrant. It's almost as if she was bored with her own white upbringing.

That impression is reinforced when she talks about loving reading and writing because of the chance they give you to be someone else.

Small town life can be stifling, she says - something she only really realised when she left York to go to university in Birmingham.

"It is that sense of claustrophobia, that sense of people knowing you. When you go into town and see your old teacher in the supermarket, or see your first boyfriend when you go down the pub with your new boyfriend, it can be very difficult to reinvent yourself."

So writing Paradise Jazz was in a way an attempt to break free. The city in her novel is a composite of Durham and York, she says.

"And Paradise Jazz is what I wished there could have been. It's the kind of place where anything could happen. The big emotional climaxes in the book often happen in the Paradise. You've got the music and the blues, and that late night atmosphere that lets people rip. You need a place like that. At least I did."

Both Georgetown and Helena are characters in search of themselves. Georgetown is desperate to find out the identity of her father, whom she has never seen or met. Her mother refuses to tell her, and Georgetown's quest to find out the truth takes her back to her birthplace in Texas. What she discovers is more violent and cruel than she could have believed.

Helena's journey takes her to the Scottish islands, and is no less emotional.

But these are plot devices. What makes Paradise Jazz rock is the Paradise itself and its gallery of larger-than-life black characters.

Kat claims to be surprised at the attention a white writer's attempt to write a black novel has attracted. "When I wrote the book I didn't think it would be an issue. It was when I started meeting agents I realised what a huge thing it was. People assumed I was black and it was only when they met me they realised I wasn't. It almost feels like it is a taboo that I've broken."

What the reaction of black readers to her book will be, I don't know. But you can't help feeling the real York would benefit from a club like the Paradise.

Paradise Jazz by Kat Pomfret is published by Snow Books, priced £7.99.

Updated: 09:00 Saturday, June 25, 2005