The Day That Went Missing: Richard Beard

The Day That Went Missing: Richard Beard

by RichardBeard (Author)

Synopsis

SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2018 SHORTLISTED FOR THE JAMES TAIT BLACK PRIZE 2018 A family story of exceptional power and universal relevance - about loss, about carrying on, and about recovering a brother's life and death. Life changes in an instant. On a family summer holiday in Cornwall in 1978, Nicholas and his brother Richard are jumping in the waves. Suddenly, Nicholas is out of his depth. He isn't, and then he is. He drowns. Richard and his other brothers don't attend the funeral, and incredibly the family return immediately to the same cottage - to complete the holiday, to carry on. They soon stop speaking of the catastrophe. Their epic act of collective denial writes Nicky out of the family memory. Nearly forty years later, Richard Beard is haunted by the missing grief of his childhood but doesn't know the date of the accident or the name of the beach. So he sets out on a pain-staking investigation to rebuild Nicky's life, and ultimately to recreate the precise events on the day of the accident. Who was Nicky? Why did the family react as they did? And what actually happened? The Day That Went Missing is a heart-rending story as intensely personal as any tragedy and as universal as loss. It is about how we make sense of what is gone. Most of all, it is an unforgettable act of recovery for a brother.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 288
Edition: 1
Publisher: Harvill Secker
Published: 06 Apr 2017

ISBN 10: 1910701564
ISBN 13: 9781910701560
Book Overview: The Day That Went Missing is a family story of exceptional power and universal relevance - about loss, about carrying on, and about recovering a brother's life and death.

Media Reviews
A memoir of real truth and heartbreaking emotional heft * Sunday Times *
This captivating book, both heart-rending and jaw-dropping, unfolds like a detective story * Daily Mail *
A touching, painful disquisition on memory and forgetting and the tendrils that tie us to the past -- Caroline Moorehead * Guardian *
Clear-eyed, very sad, funny at times and, despite the story it tells, ultimately uplifting in its determination to confront buried truths. * Sebastian Faulks *
A devastating forage into memory and the brutality of the stiff upper lip -- Evie Wyld * Observer *
Author Bio
Richard Beard's most recent book is Acts of the Assassins, which was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. In the twenty years since his first book he has published critically acclaimed novels and narrative non-fiction, including Becoming Drusilla, the story of how a friendship between two men was changed by a gender transition. He was formerly Director of the National Academy of Writing in London, and is now a Visiting Professor at the University of Tokyo and has a Creative Writing Fellowship at the University of East Anglia. He is an optimistic opening batsman for the Authors Cricket Club.