The Cuckoo's Child

Extract:

My question had been simple enough. All it needed was an equally simple answer, yet Dad would not meet my gaze and shifted from side to side as if his chair had suddenly become uncomfortably warm. He cleared his throat, ran a finger over his moustache as if to assure himself it was still there, looking just like Dr. Crippen, another meek little man hiding secrets.
Rage flooded my head, red hot. How like him to squirm and temporize! I wanted to pin him down, nail him, stop his wriggling, in spite of the pleading in Mum’s eyes and the concern in yours. So I persisted and forced an answer.
“Ah, well, mmm,” he ventured. “You could say that. In a manner of speaking.”
And as I stared at him, dumbfounded, the lights dimmed and surged twice, then went out altogether. And while Dad seized the chance of escape and delay, fetching propane lamps and candles and a tiny camping stove from the basement, I sat, extinguished, plunged into a darkness as absolute and chilly as any experienced that night under the remorseless accumulation of ice.

In her forties, Livvy Alvarsson hopes to be a bone marrow donor for her much-loved younger brother, Stephen. Instead, she discovers she has no idea who she is. This is the second great loss she has suffered, for eleven years earlier her four-year-old son, Daniel, disappeared. Armed with a few clues from wartime England, she embarks on a search for her birth family.