Summary
When Sathnam Sanghera was twenty-four years old he discovered a secret about his father that would both darken, and illuminate his life. His father had been schizophrenic for almost all his adult life and, in the early years of his marriage to Sathnam's mother, had been terrifyingly violent towards his family.
The discovery would set the author on a journey into his family's past- from his father's harsh life in rural Punjab, to the terrifying early years of his parents' marriage in England; from his mother's extraordinary resilience as she brought up her young family in a foreign land, without any knowledge of its language, to the author's happy memories of his own childhood - his obsessions with George Michael and how to have the perfect top knot.
And, most affectingly of all, this discovery would finally force Sanghera's own secret life into the glaring light- his longing for romantic love which he had, for fear of family rejection, kept utterly hidden from his beloved mother in the Midlands.
