Shah - who is looking to oust Respect’s George Galloway at the general election in May - begins her story in Bradford aged six, when her father ran off with a teenage neighbour, leaving her and her pregnant mother destitute.

"I remember been thrown into the back of a taxi with black bin liners full of our belongings and packed off from the family home on Hartman Place to my granddads home in Kirkham Road," she writes. "We never really saw the end of black bin liners over the next few years as we moved from squalor to squalor, 14 times in less than 2 years, from back to back houses where the toilet was outside to rat infested damp houses where we lived and slept in just one room."

The family eventually found a home, but only at the cost of Shah's mother living with a violent man. Shah was sent to Pakistan aged 12 to escape him, but was later forced into an unhappy and abusive marriage herself. Her mother, meanwhile, cracked under the pressure.

"The following years of anti- depressants, failed suicide attempts and feeling desperate and destitute she snapped," explains Shah. "She killed the man who abused her."

Shah's life was quickly plunged into further turmoil when her mother was sentenced to 20 years in jail for murder.

"I remember how my days and nights became one, how my world was turned upside down, how I became a mother to my two siblings who were 11 and 13 at the time," she writes. "... When my mother didn’t tell her story of abuse at her trail due to the fear of 'izzat' (honour/shame) it was my mother who was not believed. Every chapter of her life following her marriage is a book in itself, how her husband refused to pick up her first child because she was a girl, how she was battered by her husband, how she lost children due to beatings. How she lost all her 'izzat' when she was on the front page of the local rag as a murderer and sentenced to 20 years."

In 1992, Shah left her abusive husband but she still struggled. "I visited my mother at Newhall Prison, when I left it was like leaving a crying child at nursery for the first time, I now became a mother to my mother. We lost the house, we lost everything and the moving around started all over again," she recalls.

With the help of the Southall Black Sisters and other women's justice groups, Shah eventually managed to get her mother's sentence reduced to 14 years, on the basis that she was driven to kill.

Her experience gave her a thirst for campaigning and she managed to turn her life around. She worked for the Samaritans and as a carer for children with disabilities before landing a role with the NHS, giving out grants. It helped her to develop her leadership qualities, as she continued to "fly the flag around violence against women through speaking at conferences and contributing to discussions".

Shah's mother - whom she describes as "my rock" - is now 63 and and out of jail. Shah has a family of her own; her 10-year-old daughter Leyana, and two sons Aydan (seven) and Raese (three).

Why everyone's talking about Naz Shah, the new MP candidate with an incredible life story