Poppadom Preach by Almas Khan, Simon & Schuster, £7.99

Judging by promotional blurb for Almas Khan’s book, it looked like another whimsical, comic account of growing up in a Muslim family in 1970s Bradford.

“In the year Twix and Smash are invented and Englebert Humperdinck is top of the charts, Dilly is born into the chaotic Shah family,” it reads.

“Never out of trouble, she reads the Koran lying down, recites lewd Northern rhymes…and keeps a goat for a pet.”

The title is a bit naff, although it made me smile, and I started it expecting a mildly amusing memoir featuring space hoppers, Spangles and the Bay City Rollers. These icons of 1970s cultural reference do get a mention, but barely into the first chapter I realised this wasn’t your average slice of Seventies nostalgia.

It is clear straight away that Dilly is used to violence at home, from casual slaps across the face on a daily basis from her horrible mother – who regularly locks her in the cellar – to brutal punches laid out by her foul-tempered father.

He splits his wife’s lip, simply because she’s in his way, and whips Dilly and her younger sister with electric cable because they’ve been talking to boys at school. What’s more disturbing is the nonchalant way the violence is mentioned. Dilly simply expects to be slapped, punched and pushed around by her parents – not to mention the racist school bully and her lazy aunt, ‘Auntie Climax’ – and doesn’t flinch.

But the beatings don’t make her a passive, obedient child. Spirited and bright, with a hunger to learn – she often has her nose in her father’s dictionary and despairs of her mother’s half-hearted attempt to learn basic English – she’s endearingly and infuriatingly rebellious, with a mouth like a sewer.

The threat of brutal punishment doesn’t stop her from rallying the neighbourhood children into stealing the left shoes of men in the local mosque, stealing a goat from next door’s garden or giving her sister a lump of melted tar from the back alley, telling her it’s chewing-gum. As she approaches adolescence, and her parents arrange for her to marry a cousin in Pakistan, Dilly’s British-Asian identity crisis deepens.

“It wasn’t the threat of violence that made me uneasy – I was used to that – but the growing realisation that I was living two lives. At school I had to keep my teachers happy by conforming to the British way of life, then when I came home I had to flick a switch in my mind and become an Asian to keep my family happy. It was getting harder and harder to keep the two worlds separate.” Dilly’s story is funny and tragic in equal measures. You can chuckle at her brother’s horror of discovering, at his wedding, that his new bride is 18in shorter than him and thick as a plank, then wince at the sinister gloating of Dilly’s mother who relishes telling her daughter she is ugly and worthless.

Poppadom Preach is nicely written, with rounded characters and a well-observed account of childhood.

But it’s often uncomfortable reading. There are no recognisable Bradford references, and I can’t decide whether the ending is uplifting or disturbing.