IN THE acknowledgements in the back of Sathnam Sanghera's literary debut the author thanks his editor Mary Mount for convincing him that “books aren't always written by other people”. I would like to thank Mary, too, for she encouraged Sanghera to give us a fascinating and timely book.

But while I offer generous praise to the editor and to Sanghera himself for the candour, the honesty and, ultimately, the bravery of his work, I would also like to condemn him for managing to ruin any chance I had of writing a similarly sweet memoir of my Punjabi life as I grew up in the Seventies.

If You Don't Know Me By Now is actually two books in one - both a beautifully poignant memoir of the child of a working-class Punjabi immigrant family growing up in the Sikh ghetto in Wolverhampton and the troubling and depressing story of a child living in a family paralysed by schizophrenia.

Both stories are at once gripping and entertaining, horrifying and tender. My only issue with the book is whether they belong intertwined around the same narrative.

As a child of 1969 myself, coming from a family of Punjabi immigrants to Britain, I might be forgiven for thinking that every beat, every detail, every anecdote of Sanghera's life in the Black Country would have chimed completely, intersecting with my own Glaswegian upbringing. There are two crucial differences in our backgrounds. First, he grew up in an uneducated family whereas my experiences were those of the educated lower-middle classes: never before would I have thought such a subtle distinction could have led to such starkly different childhoods. Secondly - and in many ways more crucially - unlike Sathnam Sanghera I did not know every Wham and/or George Michael lyric by heart.

It wasn't until his mid-twenties that Sanghera realised his father was a paranoid schizophrenic and that his eldest sister shared the condition. The book is his journey as he attempts to discover the truth about his father's illness and to understand the life that his mother has led.

It is at times a harrowing story of domestic violence, irrational and repetitive behaviour and a wasted, damaged life. And since Sanghera's father is still a schizophrenic the journey has a certain incompleteness, a lack of closure. The bravery with which the author relates events that most other families would seek to hide means that his book throbs with honesty, frustration and pathos. And insight: deep, poignant insight that exposes all those things we take for granted as we grow up that were so different for the author.

Intermingled with this quest is the story of a Sikh kid growing up in Wolverhampton, among the most densely populated Sikh community in the UK. This, too, is a gripping yarn full of insights into the second-generation experience. Even as an eight-year-old, Sanghera had never visited a cinema, used a telephone or had a white friend. Then there was the stomach-churning visit to the barber to have his top-knot dealt with.

These childhood adventures grow and develop into adult adventures, for example having to conceal his cohabitation with Laura, his white girlfriend.

Both aspects of this book are worthy of reading but I'm not sure that in combining them they are stronger than the sum of the parts. The reminiscence is so delightful, insightful and charming that it seems to collide unfavourably on occasion with the violence of his father's condition. And at the end of the book I felt I wanted to know more about how Mr Jagjit Singh Sanghera felt and thought and ultimately how he continues to live.

This reservation aside, it is clear that the literary world should welcome a truthful and honest voice that comes from a new generation of very British writers who happen to have had Indian parents. I just wish I had got there first ...

If You Don't Know Me By Now: A Memoir of Love, Secrets and Lies in Wolverhampton by Sathnam Sanghera
Viking, £16.99, 336pp

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