It’s getting to that point when we’re all looking back at the decade and thinking about what are the really important books. My vote goes to Sathnam Sanghera’s The Boy With A Top Knot, a brilliant memoir about Sathnam’s quest to find the truth about his father’s madness. Satnam grew up in Wolverhampton in the 1970s, part of a self-enclosed Sikh community which lived and lives in its own bubble; he knew little of mainstream white culture until he went to school, but gaining a place at a good secondary school, he thrived and went up to Oxbridge, thereafter becoming a successful journalist. He is now a popular business columnist for the Times. His memoir explores the tensions in the worlds he inhabits and is a sort of detective story into the heart of a family nearly torn apart by cultural tensions and madness. It is a classic because it is both a universal rites of passage story and a very specific insight into a community that has never been properly illuminated in English prose before. I spoke about it with Sue McGregor and Erica Wagner, my wife, on a Good Read.
One of the most important books of the Noughties
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