The Day That Went Missing: A Family’s Story

In 1978, during a family summer holiday in Cornwall, Richard Beard's younger brother Nicholas drowns while swimming. The family does not attend the funeral and returns to the same cottage to complete their holiday. They subsequently stop discussing the tragedy, and Nicholas is effectively erased from family memory. Nearly forty years later, Beard, now an accomplished novelist, finds himself haunted by this childhood loss and the unacknowledged grief surrounding it. He lacks basic facts about the event—he does not know the date of Nicholas's death or the name of the beach where it occurred. Beard undertakes a detailed investigation to reconstruct his brother's life and to understand the precise circumstances of the accident. The Day That Went Missing examines themes of guilt, forgiveness, and confronting profound loss. It serves as both a memorial to his brother and an account of the author's own process of reckoning with this defining absence. The book won the PEN/Ackerley Prize in 2018.