Laura's mother went missing on Chapel St. Leonard's beach as a three year old before being found again a few days later. None of the previews I saw revealed the ending so I won't spoil it any further and won't do that either.
Childhood in the 1920's and after could be made a repressive regime of rules and behavioural expectations,
everything about eating seemed rude,
and the mysterious disappearance of Hugh Green, son of a local bigwig in Chapel, leaves an emptiness in his family that is compared to the discovery that a fancy, ornamental cake in a shop window is actually cardboard and hollow.
Laura's mother, known as Betty, aged 13, is accosted by a woman on a bus with a photo that purports to be evidence of who she really is; the Blanchard bread van from Hogsthorpe delivers to seemingly every house but theirs; going back to Chapel to enquire about the apparent abduction so many years previous, Laura is met with a silence that suggests the local people remember and know something.
If Laura hadn't found the answer there wouldn't have been a book but she broadens out the detail into a period piece that meditates on both economic and emotional austerity, various types of loss, downgraded expectations and stoic acceptance.
What one doesn't realize, perhaps - or I didn't- is that one's sympathies might for much of the time be misplaced but the reader isn't to know any more than those whose lives were lived on false premises did. They are the last to know.
There is much to be admired in the heroic, ordinary lives of those who may or may not be seen as the victims and Laura goes as far as she can in understanding those we might think of as the wrongdoers and takes the opportunity where she can of using her day job as art critic of The Observer to inform her account with parallels in art history.
It's probably best if we don't go back to Chapel because it won't be like we remember it on Tomlinson's Caravan Park where my grandfather had his caravan, a short walk over the sand dunes where one had to be first to see the sea. The perils of starfish and jellyfish on the beach probably aren't there any more, Walter Keeton won't be on holiday from his work batting at Trent Bridge and neither will Alfred Tennyson be there before him. It will be less genteel, probably the worse for it, and one can't go back but there are more ghosts there than even we knew about.
Any book that is read in a day can be highly recommended on that evidence alone because I didn't put it down much. There are only about half a dozen such books that I've ever done that with.