Bookplanet: something happens to novelist Ian McEwan that only happens in novels

Ian McEwan’s True Tale Led Him to a Long-Lost Brother -- by ALAN COWELL/NY Times

He is known as an author of dark and tangled tales in which love sometimes endures and sometimes does not. But Ian McEwan , one of Britain’s best-known novelists, has now found himself as a player in a true story that might have sprung from his own imagination.

The tale, first disclosed in The Oxford Mail, relates the anguish of a wartime mother in 1942, handing over her newborn baby to strangers on a railroad station platform to hide the evidence of a clandestine affair while her husband was fighting overseas.

The woman, it turns out, was Mr. McEwan’s mother. The baby was his older brother, David Sharp, now 64, whose existence the writer had not suspected.

“David got in touch with our family five years ago, and it was a great surprise and pleasure to discover that I had another brother,” Mr. McEwan said in a statement released this week by his literary agents. “We welcomed him and his family into ours and we keep in touch. We attended his daughter’s wedding last year.”

“I am sad he never got the chance to know our parents,” Mr. McEwan said.

As told by Mr. Sharp to British reporters, the story began in 1942, when a want ad appeared in a small-town newspaper, The Reading Mercury, west of London. “Wanted,” it said, “home for baby boy, age 1 month; complete surrender.” Printed between other ads for musical instruments and secondhand furniture, it gave an address for applicants to write to.

The child was the offspring of Mr. McEwan’s mother, then called Rose Wort, and David McEwan, an army officer with whom she had an affair while her husband, Ernest, was away. A couple named Rose and Percy Sharp applied to take the baby, who was handed over to them at a railroad station. In a further twist, Ernest, Rose’s husband, died during the Normandy landings in 1944, allowing her to marry David McEwan. Ian McEwan was born in 1948, six years after his brother.

The older brother discovered at 14 that he was adopted. Eight years later the woman who had raised him as an adoptive mother died. His adoptive father would tell him only that the family “got him out of a newspaper.”

Unaware of each other, the two brothers went different ways. Mr. Sharp left school to become a bricklayer at 15, according to accounts in British newspapers based on his version of events.

Mr. McEwan was educated at a boarding school and universities to embark on what turned into a bright and prize-studded literary career. His novels include “Enduring Love,” published here in 1997, “Amsterdam,” which won the Booker Prize in 1998, and “Atonement,” published in 2001.

Later Mr. Sharp discovered a clipping of the newspaper advertisement offering him for adoption. And still later he contacted a tracing service run by the Salvation Army to locate his lost family.

Even then the mystery remained somewhat elusive, according to British newspaper accounts, because Rose McEwan had Alzheimer’s disease and could not provide the details. But an aunt broke a vow of secrecy to tell Mr. Sharp about his mother’s decision.

When he was united with Mr. McEwan, Mr. Sharp said, he did not know how famous his brother was. “I had never heard of him at the time,” he said. The two men had been living close to each other in Oxfordshire.

“I’ve read all his books now, but whether he’s a road sweeper or an author is immaterial.” Mr. Sharp said, according to several British newspaper accounts. “He’s just my brother to me.”

Mr. Sharp himself has written a book about his quest. It is called “Complete Surrender” — the term used in the 1942 advertisement — but it is not clear when it will be published.

Mr. Sharp said he had offered Mr. McEwan the chance to tell his life story. “But he said it was my story and therefore I should tell it,” Mr. Sharp told British newspapers.