The day that went missing : a family's story / Richard Beard.

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. What happens next is denial on an epic scale. Richard and his other brothers don't attend the funeral, and immediately afterwards the family returns to the same cottage to complete the holiday, to carry on. They soon stop speaking of the catastrophe and Nicky fades from 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.