THE SWEET FAMILY snap of a doleful-looking little Indian boy in a party hat being held by his formally suited father on the dust-jacket of this rather strange memoir gives no warning of its occasionally shocking contents. 'It is disconcerting to be entering a brothel with your father,' Hanif Kureishi tells us at one point. He is referring to the experience of reading an unpublished novel found amongst the papers of his dead father which is closely based on the elder man's own adolescence, and reveals the hidden parts of his life.

Hanif Kureishi, best known for My Beautifull Laundrette and The Buddha of Suburbia, which laid bare the modern twist and edge of Asian life on the peripheries of Britain's cities, believes that it is a waste of time and effort not to be searingly honest in his writing. So nothing