The Ticking is the Bomb, By Nick Flynn

At one of his readings, Nick Flynn is given a gift by a young woman in the audience. It's a small bronze statue of a monkey standing on its hind legs, its hands clasping its chest. It isn't pointing to its heart, but ripping its chest open. "I saw it and thought of you," says the girl.

The emotional honesty in Flynn's memoir is as red-blooded as an open wound. It's as if he has shed the protective skin of cynicism or irony, leaving him exposed to both the brutal malignancy of the world as well as its intense beauty.

His book is a "memoir of bewilderment". Two months before his daughter is born, he reflects on his inner fragility and whether he has the competence to be a father. His own father was jailed for fraud – he called himself a bank robber, which had more glamour attached to it than "fuck-up" – and ended up living on the streets.

Flynn worked in a shelter for the homeless and sometimes he would care for his father when he found him there. The story of his relationship with his father was told in Flynn's heart-wrenching earlier memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City.

When Flynn's mother was pregnant with him she attempted suicide. She killed herself when she was 42 by shooting herself in the heart. "I walk through the world carrying that fear, that the beloved will go, will die, and that I will be the one to blame."

As a boy, his mother, obsessed with calamity and trauma, would take him on ambulance-chasing excursions to witness whatever tragedy the vehicles were speeding to attend: "was she teaching me to pay close attention to the world? Or to the afterworld?" Flynn wonders whether she was practising for when the sirens came for her.

The consequence of his difficult childhood meant that Flynn has spent his life avoiding commitment: "I was vapour, I was air, I was nowhere". He knows the child he is about to father isn't like a city or a woman – he can't simply visit now and then. He suffers the anxiety common to most expectant fathers - that he will feel nothing for his child, his emotions cauterised by experience.

What gives this memoir its astonishing resonance is how Flynn effortlessly connects the personal with a much broader vision. Watching the destruction of the World Trade Centre on television, even though it was happening only a few blocks away, he sees his own moral collapse reflected in the screen as the towers crumble. Later, photographs of Abu Ghraib torture victims prompt him to consider man's capacity for cruelty, and that it's not so hard for someone who has grown up with the idea that human beings are disposable to brutalise someone else. Flynn seems to have no defences, no X-factor to shield him from the ghoulish horrors of the modern world.

This memoir is an appeal for redemption, in his case by bringing new life into the world. His narrative is driven by self-doubt and acutely reasoned analysis, but it is always humane, compelling and unsentimental.

It's rare that a piece of writing can speak so openly and engage so deeply with our hopes and fears. When he views a photograph of himself holding his newborn child, he sees himself "smiling so broadly that I barely recognise myself".

Amid the chaos and the moral breakdown, the pointless wars and the narcissism of political expedience, maybe it's the small, simple things that heal: "sometimes we just need to be held; sometimes we just need to be told we are beautiful".