[4] The book begins with the author at age eleven in 1978, swimming in the sea off Cornwall, England, with his nine-year-old brother, Nicky.

He interviews his mother and two surviving brothers, Tim and Jem, as well as one of the men who crewed the lifeboat that pulled Nicky's body from the sea.

He is shocked when his mother tells him something that he, Tim and Jem have all erased from their memories: immediately after their parents returned from Nicky's funeral (which the boys were not permitted to attend) in their hometown of Swindon, the family drove straight back to the same vacation house they had been renting in Cornwall to spend another week.

He is angry with the older man for having sent each of his sons away at the age of eight to live at boarding school, where they had to shut down their feelings of homesick abandonment in order to both avoid being bullied and be judged a success; for being the prime agent of repression who kept the family from speaking about Nicky; and above all, for not jumping into the sea and trying to save his son that terrible day in Cornwall, when he seemingly had so little to lose.

"[10] The reviews for the 2018 U.S. release were similarly positive: Laurie Hertzel wrote in the Minneapolis Star Tribune: "Beard’s book has all the required elements of a great memoir—a compelling story, deep introspection, fine writing and an unflinching quest for factual and emotional truth.

Reading Nicky's laudatory school reports for research:"I realised, or remembered, that on the far side of the wall we had been rivals...His growing up endangered my status.

"[14]In the second article, Beard discussed the impact that writing the book had on him and his family after decades of not speaking about Nicky: "The trouble with denial is that it’s not a precision tool.

But in resisting grief we shut out other stuff too, like the joy Nicky brought us and the characteristics that made him an individual human being...It was worth toughing out the doubts to discover that a book could bring my immediate family closer.

Mum sends me frequent postcards, dotted with exclamation marks, to say that at last she feels a weight has been lifted, though she also laments the waste of time, our long, ungiving silence.