On Chapel Sands: My mother and other missing persons

Laura Cumming

Jul 2019 · Random House

About this ebook

**THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER**
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD**

Uncovering the mystery of her mother's disappearance as a child: Laura Cumming, prize-winning author and art critic, takes a closer look at her family story.

'A modern masterpiece' Guardian

Autumn 1929 - a young girl is kidnapped from a beach. Five agonising days go by before she is discovered safe and well in a nearby village. The child remembers nothing of these events and at home, nobody ever speaks of them again.

Decades later, Laura Cumming delves into the mystery surrounding her mother's disappearance. Examining everything from old family photos to letters, tickets and recipes, she uncovers a series of secrets and lies perpetuated not just by her family but by the whole community and in doing so unlocks a mystery almost a century old.

'A moving, many-sided human story of great depth and tenderness, and a revelation of how art enriches life' Sunday Times

Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize
Longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize

Ratings and reviews

My own childhood also was lived throughout the 1960s and early 70s, in a red-brick house situated on St Leonard's Drive, Chapel St Leonards. Lincolnshire was, and remains, a strangely fearful place. Secrets are assiduously preserved, mainly (or so I believe) in order to avoid conflict at all costs. And through it all, through the fear, the repression of emotion, the social blindness and personal dislocation that accompanies such repression, abides the search for the existence of love. Laura Cumming is an exemplary and graceful writer, eloquent in her description of life as a phenomenon which is rarely certain, seldom known. In all my years, never would I have dreamt that so significant a work as this would ever have been written with the (then) tiny and remote settlement of Chapel St Leonards at its heart. Neither would I have believed there could ever be a connection between that particular village, and Breughel's 'Landscape with the Fall of Icarus'. Fascinating biography.

Fantastic read.

About the author

Laura Cumming has been chief art critic of the Observer since 1999. Her book, The Vanishing Man: In Pursuit of Velázquez, was Book of the Week on Radio 4, Wall Street Journal Book of the Year and a New York Times bestseller. It won the 2017 James Tait Black Biography Prize and was published to critical acclaim (‘A riveting detective story: readers will be spellbound’ Colm Tóibín). Her first book, A Face to the World: On Self-Portraits, was described by Nick Hornby as ‘Brilliant, fizzing with ideas not just about art but human nature’ and by Julian Barnes as ‘that rare item: an art book where the text is so enthralling that the pictures almost seem like an interruption’.