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Mohammed Manzoor had to work for 11 years before he could bring his wife and four children over from Pakistan to join him. He lived in a house with 31 other Pakistanis, sleeping in shifts. When his family was finally able to make the long trip over to England, his wife had all of five rupees in her purse and not a word of English. It's no surprise, perhaps, that the youngest Manzoor boy, Sarfraz, grew up in a household that stressed self-reliance and hard work, with no thought of pleasure. It's equally unsurprising that Saf, as he styled himself, growing up in unglamorous Luton, just wanted to have fun.

The age-old immigrant's story of hungry hearts and divided loyalties is delivered with uncommon honesty and understanding in Sarfraz Manzoor's Greetings from Bury Park. But what gives the memoir its special kick is that the Pakistani-born Briton, now 35, manages to stake out his own life, more hopeful than his parents', not by becoming an assimilated Englishman, nor by turning to radical Islam, but by becoming, of all things, a Springsteenite. In the songs of the Catholic Bruce Springsteen, from New Jersey, the keema aloo-loving boy in working-class England finds a way to grasp his parents' dreams while also claiming new dreams of his own. From Springsteen, he breathes in a distinctly American sense of possibility, and the freedom of self-reinvention. Amid the regular guys and waitresses of a Springsteen concert, he also finds a community he could never find among Britain's trendy Asians or white neighbors who call him a Paki.

The great charm of Greetings from Bury Park lies in the everyday details of Manzoor's coming of age in a home that will never be home for his mum and dad. His mother, when he was young, cut the grass with a pair of scissors, while his brother slept on a hospital trolley bed, and the others all slept on the floor. His father got up at 7 a.m. and dressed for work even after he had been laid off by the local Vauxhall car plant. As for Saf, we meet him wearing pajamas under his trousers so he doesn't look so skinny, and planning a rock group called Yasser Arafat and the Ayatollahs of Love. The overwhelming impression is of a dark-skinned Woody Allen hoping to remake himself as a bruiser from New Jersey's Asbury Park.

There's nothing new about such tales of hardship and pop-culture dreaming, of course (Saf's older sister swoons to Hopelessly Devoted to You from Grease). But in Manzoor's telling, every sigh comes with a different inflection. This is a boy who kisses the Koran before wishing for a ZX Spectrum computer, and was so innocent in adolescence that he thought a "blue movie" was one that made you cry. When he and his best friend, a Sikh, head off to their first Springsteen concert, they go armed with the vegetable samosas and chapatis their mothers have cooked for them.

Such writers as Hanif Kureishi have pushed immigrant longing against the liberations of rock 'n' roll before, but never with the sweetness and forgiving candor of Manzoor. The night he discovers Springsteen, thanks to his Sikh buddy, he had spent the evening massaging his father's feet. The effect of "The Boss" is so galvanic that his pal actually shaves off his beard and abandons his ritual turban. But Manzoor himself never has the heart to turn his back on his parents entirely, noting with typical wryness: "By high school my friends were starting to drink and I was starting to fast."

As the book goes on, the Springsteen associations are never explored as intensely as they might be, given that songs like Independence Day and My Father's House map out a worldwide atlas of the tangles between father and son. And in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Manzoor gives up a bit on America and its hopefulness, as his hero (on his album of reconciliation, The Rising) seldom does. But by then Manzoor has already showed us how to live as something more than just a Briton, a Muslim or a Pakistani. At a concert in New Jersey once, an American fan, taking him for a terrorist, challenges Manzoor to name his favorite Springsteen songs. As he starts to reel off the numbers that speak to him — one after another — the clash of civilizations suddenly begins to sound remote, and we're in the midst of a mass sing-along in which white and black and "other" hardly make any sense at all.

• PICO IYER
• An affecting memoir recounts how Bruce Springsteen changed the life of a Pakistani immigrant in Britain