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**BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK**

‘A contemporary masterpiece’ Guardian

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

In the autumn of 1929, a little child was kidnapped from a Lincolnshire beach. Five agonising times went by before she was found in a nearby village. The child appreciated nothing of the events and no one ever spoke of these at home. It had been another about On Chapel Sands: My mother and other missing people fifty years before she also learned of the kidnap.

The lady became an artist and had a daughter, art writer Laura Cumming. Cumming grew up enthralled by her mother’s strange tales of lifestyle in a seaside hamlet of the 1930s, and of the secrets and is situated perpetuated by a complete community. A lot of puzzles remained to become solved. Cumming began using a few criss-crossing lives in this small fraction of English coast – the postman, the grocer, the elusive baker – but soon her search spread right out throughout the world as she found out just how many lives had been suffering from what happened that day for the seaside – including her personal.

On Chapel Sands is a reserve of mystery and memoir. Two narratives tell you it: the mother’s childhood tale; and Cumming’s personal pursuit of the reality. Humble objects light up the story: a pie dish, a carved box, an old Vick’s jar. Words, tickets, recipe books, even the particular slant of the copperplate hand give vital clues. And pictures of all types, from paintings to photos, open up like doors to the reality. Above all, Cumming discovers how to look more closely at the family album – using its inquisitive gaps and missing persons – finding important answers, captured in ordinary sight in the click of a shutter.

‘A moving, many-sided human tale of great depth and tenderness, and a surprising rvelation of how art enriches life’ Sunday Situations

(c) 2019, Laura Cumming (P) 2019 Penguin Audio