Nancy, a London-based narrator, has just discovered that she has a half-brother from New Zealand and a half-sister, inherited from her father’s previous relationship. Her other has died recently  and never fully explained to the reader. Nancy finds to her surprise that she is pregnant by a distant partner. The discovery of Oliver , her half-brother, ruptures Nancy’s relationship with Rita her half-sister. Rita struggles to accept a stranger as part of a family that is complicated enough especially when doing so tarnishes the image of her late father.

Nancy’s world is punched inside out at the above discoveries.

As Nancy’s relationship with her sister becomes strained, and her partner, Samar, predictably rejects fatherhood and their relationship.  A Womanising comedian with an estranged half-brother of his own back home, Oliver stays with Nancy in her flat, initially for a series of London show, and then indefinitely as he takes on the role of a surrogate boyfriend. “ The rules of this domestic arrangement were becoming increasingly vague  – Cleaning the oven, cooking me dinner, It didn’t feel short-term having a short-term having a man-shaped body in the flat shaved a few inches off my loneliness”.

Oliver becomes Cuckoo of the title inhabiting a nest not his own.  Nell Frizzell  writes about parenthood “my neck bent back like a bottle of Toilet Duck”; “he rotated his whole body … I thought of the grey columns of kebab meat in takeaway windows”. 

Nancy remembers , how her father would compare her with Rita through jokes and games, “Over and over again our identity was forged by a game of contrast. I was not made in my sister’s image but against it.”

After meeting Oliver, she is struck by the features he shares with Nancy and her father: “: The nose was mine. The lips were mine. The hands that held his coffee cup were Dad’s”.

Frizzell draw  comparisons with Nancy and her siblings, she examines what connects us to other people and what makes them so integral to our lives and identities. “ It was a game that all family play who looks like whom. It’s a ritual. It’s a net, woven from bodies, the behaviour and the beliefs of its participants”.

Ultimately Nancy’s fractured family rallies around her when she gives birth, “ What makes a family is looking after each other. Loving each other. Being there and unconditional and being familiar”.

Cuckoo by Neil Frizzell, Bantam £18.99