Complete Surrender - The True Story of a Family's Dark Secret and the Brothers it Tore Apart at Birth

Book excerpt: Wanted:Home for baby boy, aged 1 month, complete surrender. In late 1942, that advert was placed in the Reading Mercury. Two weeks later, on the deserted platform of Reading railway station, a young couple who had read the advert were to fleetingly meet the mother of this baby boy as she passed the child over to them. The reasons for the surrender of her child were never explained. The boy, Dave Sharp, grew up happily, never knowing the full story of his parentage. But a chance discovery some sixty years later was to set him on a quest to uncover the truth behind his mysterious abandonment. This search would lead to shocking and uncomfortable revelations, both for Dave and for the family that he discovered. Not only was Dave, a bricklayer by trade, to be united with the brother he never knew he had, world-famous novelist Ian McEwan, but the two men were to discover a shared history and a relationship closer than they could ever have imagined.