Brought to you by Penguin.
**BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK**
'A modern masterpiece' Guardian
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.
In the autumn of 1929, a small child was kidnapped from a Lincolnshire beach.
Five agonising days went by before she was found in a nearby village. The child
remembered nothing of these events and nobody ever spoke of them at home. It was
another fifty years before she even learned of the kidnap.
The girl became an artist and had a daughter, art writer Laura Cumming. Cumming
grew up enthralled by her mother's strange tales of life in a seaside hamlet of
the 1930s, and of the secrets and lies perpetuated by a whole community. So many
puzzles remained to be solved. Cumming began with a few criss-crossing lives in
this fraction of English coast - the postman, the grocer, the elusive baker -
but soon her search spread ri...