It's 13 years since Tim Lott published this raw, candid memoir of depression, reissued now with sunny cover photograph by Martin Parr, that arch scrutineer of humdrum English lives. In part, Lott's story is about escaping such a life in the 1970s, an angry boy from a working-class London suburb who achieved an unlikely dream of riches  glamour even  but could not find the heart to live it. More than once he was on the brink of suicide  ready to leap from a tube platform, from the roof of his smart Notting Hill flat  but lived to tell the tale. Medication worked, but having barely regained his sanity Lott picked up the phone one day to learn that his mother  a healthy, busy, ostensibly happy woman in her late 50s  had hanged herself in the family home.

The book was born as an investigation into her death and, through that, a fathoming of the dark urgings that almost did for Lott himself. What clues lurked in genes or circumstance? Was it the fault of bad brain chemistry or life's buffetings? Was it a case for pills or psychoanalysis, of matter or mind? Lott delves into his family history, poring over photographs and yellowed jottings, gathering testimony, reviving the dead in new colours and compendious detail  a petty villain on the rob, a grandfather destroyed by grief, a simple-minded uncle mired in a helpless lethargy. The writing moves with his method of inquiry, variously poetic, forensic, philosophical, always with an eye on the story. Lott's account of his difficult babyhood, his vexed romances, a horrific encounter with LSD, read like fiction of the best sort, as he carefully marks the changes of his native Southall, once a rosy, privet-hedged refuge from urban poverty, now a community gone to the dogs, its song of personal tragedy sounding a lament, too, for a disappeared, hopeful England.