Publisher's Synopsis
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, and drowns. Richard and his older brothers don't attend the funeral; incredibly, the family return immediately to the same cottage to complete the holiday. They soon stop speaking of the catastrophe, and Nicky is written 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 painstaking 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?
