Five Days Gone: The Mystery of My Mother's Disappearance as a Child

Time to Read
4 hrs 56 mins

Reading Time

4 hrs 56 mins

How long to read Five Days Gone: The Mystery of My Mother's Disappearance as a Child?

The estimated word count of Five Days Gone: The Mystery of My Mother's Disappearance as a Child is 73,935 words.

A person reading at the average speed of 250 words/min, will finish the book in 4 hrs 56 mins. At a slower speed of 150 words/min, they will finish it in 8 hrs 13 mins. At a faster speed of 450 words/min, they will finish it in 2 hrs 45 mins.

Five Days Gone: The Mystery of My Mother's Disappearance as a Child - 73,935 words
Reading Speed Time to Read
Slow 150 words/min 8 hrs 13 mins
Average 250 words/min 4 hrs 56 mins
Fast 450 words/min 2 hrs 45 mins
Five Days Gone: The Mystery of My Mother's Disappearance as a Child by Laura Cumming
Authors
Laura Cumming

More about Five Days Gone: The Mystery of My Mother's Disappearance as a Child

73,935 words

Word Count

for Five Days Gone: The Mystery of My Mother's Disappearance as a Child

7 hours and 57 minutes

Audiobook length


Description

NOMINATED FOR THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD ONE OF NPR’S BEST BOOKS OF 2019 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER Acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of The Vanishing Velazquez Laura Cumming shares the riveting story of her mother’s mysterious kidnapping as a toddler in a small English coastal village—and how that event reverberated through her own family and her art for decades.In the fall of 1929, when Laura Cumming’s mother was three years old, she was kidnapped from a beach on the Lincolnshire coast of England. There were no screams when she was taken, suggesting the culprit was someone familiar to her, and when she turned up again in a nearby village several days later, she was found in perfect health and happiness. No one was ever accused of a crime. The incident quickly faded from her memory, and her parents never discussed it. To the contrary, they deliberately hid it from her, and she did not learn of it for half a century. This was not the only secret her parents kept from her. For many years, while raising her in draconian isolation and protectiveness, they also hid the fact that she’d been adopted, and that shortly after the kidnapping, her name was changed from Grace to Betty. In Five Days Gone, Laura Cumming brilliantly unspools the tale of her mother’s life and unravels the multiple mysteries at its core. Using photographs from the time, historical documents, and works of art, Cumming investigates this case of stolen identity with the toolset of a detective and the unique intimacy of a daughter trying to understand her family’s past and its legacies. Compulsive, vivid, and profoundly touching, Five Days Gone is a masterful blend of memoir and history, an extraordinary personal narrative unlike any other.