The Day That Went Missing: A Family's Story - Hardcover

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.

Shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award
Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize

"Beard, a novelist, takes a deeper look at the worst day of his family's life, when his younger brother drowned during their seaside vacation; the examination is both terribly moving and somehow life-affirming."―Boston Globe

"A memoir of real truth and heartbreaking emotional heft"―Sunday Times


"A touching, painful disquisition on memory and forgetting and the tendrils that tie us to the past."―Guardian


"This haunting book is a profoundly moving study of memory, denial and grief."―Minneapolis Star Tribune

"...heartfelt, heartbreaking and heartless."―Jim Crace, The New Statesman

"Beard's stunning memoir tells the tragic story of his family's 1978 vacation and the subsequent 40 years he spent forgetting it.... [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, Beard's narrative is at once a story about the long and difficult road to self-forgiveness and a commentary on the wages of British emotional repression. A quietly brooding and intense memoir of family and reckoning with the past."―Kirkus Reviews

"This is a fascinating book, the story of a child's accidental death and how an English family dealt with it - or rather, didn't deal with it. 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, Richard Beard's The Day That Went Missing is 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