Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Nov 2018
288 pages
Genre: Biography/Memoir
Publication Information
Set in Cornwall, England, "A memoir of real truth and heartbreaking emotional heft" (the Sunday Times) by an award-winning novelist who excavates his own suppressed childhood to discover the details of a family tragedy for which he blamed himself for four decades.
On a family summer holiday in Cornwall in 1978, Richard and his younger brother Nicholas are jumping in the waves. Suddenly, Nicholas is out of his depth. One moment he's there, the next he's gone.
Richard and his other brothers don't attend the funeral, and incredibly the family returns immediately to the same cottage - to complete the holiday, to carry on, in the best British tradition. 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, an acclaimed novelist, is haunted by the missing piece of his childhood, the unexpressed and unacknowledged grief at his core. He doesn't even know the date of his brother's death or the name of the beach where the tragedy occurred. 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.
The Day That Went Missing is a transcendent story of guilt and forgiveness, of reckoning with unspeakable loss. But, above all, it is a brother's most tender act of remembrance, and a man's brave act of survival.
"Starred Review. Stunning...[Beard's] beautifully written story is heartbreaking and unforgettable as he struggles with the grief he chose to forget and, now, attempts to remember again." - Publisher's Weekly
"Meticulously crafted and searingly honest...A quietly brooding and intense memoir of family and reckoning with the past." - Kirkus
"A memoir of real truth and heartbreaking emotional heft." - The Sunday Times (UK)
"A touching, painful disquisition on memory and forgetting and the tendrils that tie us to the past." - The Guardian (UK)
"This is a fascinating book...Clear-eyed, very sad, funny at times and, despite the story it tells, ultimately uplifting in its determination to confront buried truths." - Sebastian Faulks, author of Birdsong and Where My Heart Used to Beat
"Spellbinding, terrifying, deeply moving...a masterpiece. Fueled by Beard's dark humor and lacerating intelligence, this ferociously original memoir examines the ways in which we create mythologies to help us cope with unbearable tragedy. I basically stopped breathing on page one and didn't start again until I'd reached the book's devastating conclusion." - Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year
"Richard Beard writes with the urgency and simplicity that attend a profound relationship with grief, and in his struggle to understand his brother's death he uses prose that rivets our attention, even as he both savors and examines a wound he knows he will carry with him until the end of time." - Kate Mulgrew, actor and author of Born with Teeth
This information about The Day That Went Missing was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Richard Beard's six novels include Lazarus is Dead, Dry Bones and Damascus, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. In the UK he has been shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award and longlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award. His latest novel, Acts of the Assassins was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize in 2015. He is also the author of four books of narrative non-fiction. Formerly Director of The National Academy of Writing in London, he is a Visiting Professor at the University of Tokyo, and has a Creative Writing Fellowship at the University of East Anglia.
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