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.
When I read about this memoir, I felt so much empathy for the author, Richard Beard, who tragically looses his brother. What piqued my curiousity was how everything surrounding the tragedy is shrouded in mystery, and the memory of a young boy, or the lack there of, pushes the grown up boy to pursue the truth. What is the truth? Why does it seem the whole family kept it all from him? On my wish list.
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