Join Keep St. Pete Lit, a local organization that supports the literary community, for a book club connecting the visual and literary arts. Each month’s featured book will relate to the MFA’s collection or special exhibition.  Free with admission.

December: Five Days Gone by Laura Cummings

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. 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.

In Five Days Gone, Laura Cumming brilliantly undertakes a visual quest of her mother’s life and unravels the multiple mysteries at its core. Her professional life as an art critic and personal life as the descendent of a family of artists unites in a spectacularly moving book. Using photographs from the time, historical documents, works of art, and the visual acumen she has honed over decades of art criticism, Cumming investigates this case of stolen identity with the unique intimacy of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 and visual narrative unlike any other.

Free with admission, $10 on Thursdays after 5 pm