Complete Surrender

Real life has the habit of being stranger than fiction, and this is nowhere more convincingly confirmed than with the story of how Ian McEwan discovered that he had a brother he had never known about.

But it was really Dave Sharpe's story to tell, and tell it he has, in a (ghost written) memoir Complete Surrender, due to be launched if a few day's time.

McEwan's foreword for the book, which can be read on the Guardian website, is a most moving essay about how his brother's illegitimate birth and handing over to strangers on a railway platform has forced a painful reevaluation of family history, and of parents who almost certainly carried the pain of the lost child (whose existence they never acknowledged) to the end of their days.