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.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
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 masterpiece * Craig Brown *
Sprache
Verlagsort
Verlagsgruppe
Maße
Höhe: 222 mm
Breite: 144 mm
Dicke: 28 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-1-910701-56-0 (9781910701560)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
Richard Beard is the author of Acts of the Assassins, which was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize, and most recently the memoir The Day That Went Missing, which was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, the James Tait Black Prize and won the PEN Ackerley Prize. In the United States the book was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
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 has served as a judge for Canada's Giller Prize and for the BBC and Costa Short Story Awards, and is a dour opening batsman for the Authors Cricket Club.
