This was excellent, and was indeed full of love, secrets and lies. What struck me the most was the incredible vulnerability of the totally illiterate and those who don't speak the language of the country in which they live. Why would you never learn it?

Anyway, very moving and thought-provoking. ( )

An interesting (at times) insight into the life of the 1960s Indian immigrants into Britain.
However, the two star rating is mainly because I couldn't warm to the authors character ( )

This was an honest, amusing, sometimes heartbreaking story of one man's journey of understanding. It covers family and religion, and how this can impact on mental illness. It is also interesting to read the experiences of immigrants from India in the 60s and 70s, and how integration was for them. I recommend this to anyone, especially those dating a Sikh male - you may learn something about his mother!! ( )

This memoir starts off light and funny but takes a dark turn when Sathnam Sanghera finally discovers that his father & sister suffer from schizophrenia & that his mother suffered terrible domestic violence when she arrived in the UK aged 16 from India. However, Sanghera maintains a gentle humour throughout - not least on his visit to Wolverhampton 'tourist' office and his imagined letters to incompetent officials & in the final hurdle he has to cross- a letter to his mother about his desire to live his own life. ( )

26 April 2014 – from Gill, around World Book Night)

My friend Gill passed this to me as it was the book she was giving away for World Book Night. I read a lot of ‘children of immigrants in the UK’ and ‘tales of emigration’ books, so I thought I knew what I was expecting, but this packed quite the emotional punch. Full of substance, feeling and discussing matters that are important to discuss – I’m not going to give the main theme away as I certainly didn’t know what it was before reading the book, but a simple discovery blows the author’s ideas about his family wide apart, and he has to work to draw the edges of his experience back together and make sense of it.

Sathnam decided to write a family memoir once he’d found out the reason for some strange behaviour on his family’s part and a reluctance to face up to things on his own. He’s searingly honest about his own role in the family dynamic and his need to partition his life into a London and a Wolverhampton section, and about his ability to block out truths he doesn’t want to see and avoid his own responsibilities: this book charts his decision and action to take responsibility and face up to things. He’s also honest about general problems in the Sikh communities in the UK and India and among the 2nd generation British citizens of whom he’s a member, and his experience as a journalist allows him to do the necessary research and synthesize it into a coherent whole …

However, he finds that his family history resists fitting into neat categories and realises that it’s easier to find out facts about a golden-tinged celeb than it is about a poor Asian immigrant who is illiterate and has health problems. He ends up including letters he wrote and letters he didn’t send, and verbatim reports of conversations, as well as the history of his family and his own probings of his relationships with his family members. It’s not all misery, though – it’s wry and funny where it needs to be, and full of affection and respect for his family. A good read.

It was a WBN book so I'm passing it on via BookCrossing