Glasgow-born Rebecca Mackenzie was brought up in Asia, where she has set her debut novel.

We meet, appropriately, notes the 37-year-old, Glasgow-born debut novelist, at the Royal Over-Seas League in St James’s, where we drink tea and talk about her enchanting first book, In a Land of Paper Gods. Our surroundings are indeed fitting because Mackenzie, the eldest of three daughters of United Free Church of Scotland missionaries, was raised overseas, in Thailand, Malaysia and India, although her novel mesmerisingly transports readers to a missionary school in war-torn China in the 1940s.

There is a tremendous pre-publication buzz around her assured debut. Comparisons are being drawn with J G Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible and Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. All the advance praise is immensely flattering, acknowledges Mackenzie quietly.

In a Land of Paper Gods is grounded in fact, but it’s also a soaring work of the imagination telling of events way beyond Mackenzie’s ken. It is inspired by the history of missionaries in China, where Protestants first went in 1807, remaining until the Communists closed the country in 1953. They founded hospitals, preached from tracts, ran schools for blind children, and evangelised up and down the fabled Women’s River. As they pursued their calling, mission boarding schools were set up to educate their children. The novel is set in one such school, where ten-year-old Etta has boarded for several years.

Working on the novel led Mackenzie, via the archives of the London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and the British Library, to track down survivors of wartime China, who shared memories and precious photograph albums of missionary childhoods. In search of Etta’s ghostly childhood landscapes – pouring mists, granite peaks criss-crossed by ancient paths, temples steeped in myth and legend – she visited China, journeying from Jiangxi to Shanxi, where she found kindness and many stories.

“China has always been this mythical place in my mind; I longed to go there,” she confesses.

The result is a beautifully written book, powerfully moving but surprisingly funny, too, about a boisterous, touchingly naive, likeable girl caught between two cultures. Etta’s Scottish parents are thousands of miles away preaching the gospel in remote Chinese communities, while their daughter becomes convinced that she has a divine calling of her own. When she confides in her fellow pupils, they set off on a quest that leads to tragedy, followed by years of appalling privation in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp.

“I grew up hearing stories of heroic missionaries,” says Mackenzie, who lives, aptly, at the top of an east London vicarage. “They became surrogate ancestors in a way because our own grandparents were back in Scotland. I grew up speaking Thai, surrounded by Thai people. My parents eventually moved to Bangkok and there we were, three little girls living on the Street of the Lesser Wives. We lived between two cultures, so I’ve always wanted to explore what that means for a child, as well as the question of childhood separation, that sense of being in-between places.”

Why did she set her novel 70 years ago? “I wanted to tell a story about another culture and a very different time from the happy childhood my sisters, Mimi and Joanne, and I knew. Also, I wanted to let my imagination take flight. Setting it in a different time and place felt like an important decision to liberate me to write it. I tracked down people, now in their eighties, who had been at missionary schools in China in the 1940s. I also met a man who had been in the Japanese prisoner of war camp, Weihsien, where [the Scottish athlete] Eric Liddell was interned and died. He had given this gentleman, who died a year ago, the shoes in which he ran in the Paris Olympics in 1924. Many survivors had similarly incredible stories to tell.”

Between the wars, it was not uncommon for children as young as six or seven to have to make an annual 3,000-mile trip home to see their parents, who were working far inland. During the Second World War these journeys became more perilous, and separations between parent and child lengthened. “Some accepted that this was the way things were. Others told me that when they had children themselves, they were angry that they had been separated from their parents for so long in the name of religion.”

She began questioning religion when she was a teenager. “I rebelled – in a healthy way,” she admits. “But I came back to the church in my twenties. Now, I do have a faith in prayer and meditation but I also have lots of doubts. I chose not to address religious questions in the book, however.”

Although she has used historical detail of the Japanese invasion, the imagined camp of her novel is a darker place, with a tougher regime, than that experienced by interned children in the camp at China Inland Mission’s Chefoo School, for instance. The fictional camp is, she notes, perhaps more akin to what children underwent in other Japanese camps near Shanghai. “Chefoo School itself, the history of which I researched extensively, was nothing like the mission schools we went to [many years later], by the way. I have also used some factual details, such as the liberation of Wiehsien by American airmen, who were carried atop prisoners’ shoulders on a victory march through the gates to the accompaniment of the camp band.”

After the war, the children were repatriated, many of them, like Etta, whose strong, energetic voice Mackenzie says took her over, meeting parents they hadn’t seen for years, The children owned nothing.

When Mackenzie was 12-years-old, her family returned to Scotland. “We had nothing, so I know something of what it’s like to have no possessions,” she recalls. “We were in Brora. It was so cold, and we were in our Asian clothes. The local church donated kilts and jumpers. It was a big culture shock! I didn’t know what cold was. There was this weird feeling in your feet. You just didn’t know what it was going to become; it was so strange.

“I had no idea what people were talking about. I had no social currency to share; I was bartering in the local shops because I didn’t know that there were rules about buying things, that bartering was unseemly. Although my parents, Rory and Rosalyn, are Scottish, they had been out of the country for so long that the culture had changed dramatically for them, too. I think coming back here made me an observer – a key thing for a writer.”

Her retired parents now live in Edinburgh. “They have been very much part of the process while I’ve been writing the book. We’ve talked a lot, particularly my father and I. They’ve both been very supportive. As have my amazing sisters. Mimi, the youngest, is a dancer and movement psychotherapist and Joanne is a doctor, running a clinic in the jungle in Burma. She’s been a great help with medical facts because, of course, people fell sick in the camps.”

Educated at St Margaret’s, in Edinburgh, Mackenzie was 17 when she moved to London to read Religion, History and Thai at SOAS before gaining a Creative Writing MA at Royal Holloway under former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion. Currently, she’s attending Daljit Nagra’s poetry course at the Faber Academy. Meanwhile, she teaches improvisation workshops and performs her own pieces, fusing language and movement. “Being alive with a text on stage is so wonderful. All my movement training comes from a decade of Japanese martial arts,” she says.

“I met someone who ran a fabulous theatre company, who suggested I train in toyama ryu, rather than being an actor who is just a head on a body! I’m obsessed. I really love it; I’ve trained in Japan and taken part in tournaments. I love the ceremony, correctly putting on my clothes, working with the sword, the craftsmanship, the art.

“It’s about expressing good energy and it’s a terrific test for your mind. All these images come to me when I’m training, which is a great help with my writing because it’s all quite Zen – and it’s a step into the unknown.”

In a Land of Paper Gods by Rebecca Mackenzie (Tinder Press, £16.99).