One the most tender tributes to a family member I’ve ever read, and one of the most thoughtful. Cummings opens her book with the disappearance of the child who would become her mother from a Lincolnshire beach in 1929. Three-year-old Betty Elston stays missing for a few days before police return her to her concerned mother. But the incident is only one of many secrets that shapes Betty’s life and that of her daughter, who decides in the 1980s to help her Mum get to the bottom of this and many other inexplicable occurrences in her young life. Photographs are a key source in this detection—Betty’s father George was a keen amateur photographer—and Cummings uses these scraps of history to good effect, informed by art history and theory as well as common sense. The story ties the Elstons and others to Lincolnshire’s cultural history, contextualizing their troubles in a dense historical story without losing its uniqueness. I’ll think about this one for a long time.