MUSTREADS

Out now in paperback

THE DAY THAT WENT MISSING by Richard Beard

(Vintage £8.99) ON A fine August day in 1978, Richard Beard, 11, and his younger brother, nineyear-old Nicholas, were playing on a Cornish beach on holiday with their parents, Colin and Felicity, and their brothers, Tim, 13, and Jem, six.

Richard and Nicholas were jumping waves in an isolated cove when they suddenly found themselves struggling against the undertow. Richard swam for his life; Nicholas drowned.

A week later, after the funeral, the family returned from their home in Swindon to Cornwall to finish their holiday.

‘And so,’ Beard writes, ‘a disastrous template for survival takes shape.’

Nicholas’s death was never discussed, never acknowledged; everyone carried on as normal — except that nothing was normal. In this haunting and courageous memoir, Beard at last confronts the events of the day his brother died.

THAT’S THE WAY IT CRUMBLES by Matthew Engel

(Profile £8.99) THE days are long gone when it could be said Britain and America are ‘two nations divided by a common language’.

On the contrary, journalist Matthew Engel argues that Britain is gripped by a ‘crisis of intellectual climate change’, our language swamped by an unstoppable inundation of American vocabulary. The Americanisation of English has been grumbled about by British writers since the 19th century but, as Engel points out, many expressions that were once thought of as brash Americanisms were actually British in origin.

For example, ‘fizzle’ and ‘interview’. Others, such as ‘landslide’ and ‘rush hour’ are now completely accepted. But he urges us to stand firm against ‘guys’, ‘train station’, ‘heads-up’, ‘bug’ (for ‘beetle’) and the deplorable euphemism ‘passed’ (for ‘died’).

THE DOG’S LAST WALK by Howard Jacobson

(Bloomsbury £9.99) FOR 18 years, Booker prize- winning novelist Howard Jacobson wrote a weekly column in the Independent newspaper. By turns serious, inconsequential, nostalgic or splenetic, they were elegant exercises in the art of taking an idea for a stroll.

‘The best columns end up somewhere the columnist never expected to go,’ observed Jacobson.

In this selection, written largely between 2010 and 2016, when the Independent ceased print publication, he tackles a range of subjects almost as varied as life itself: the death of an Italian alterations tailor in Soho, the glory that is the cricket bible Wisden, online trolls, terrorism, hats, disappointing holidays and cyclists. Goodness, how he loathes cyclists . . .

‘My first responsibility, I believed,’ he wrote in a valedictory column, ‘was to entertain in a spirit of high seriousness’. This collection does exactly that.