I am not in the habit of reviewing books I have not read, but in the case of The Missing Boy by Rachel Billington am prepared to make an exception. Firstly, because I am not sure that I would cope with its emotional impact and secondly because I hope it will help to raise awareness of the sheer scale of the problem of missing children.

The Missing Boy

The Missing Boy is a novel about a 13 year old boy, Dan, who goes missing quite inexplicably. It describes both his internal and external experiences and the impact upon his family. On the surface, this bears much similarity with my son Andrew’s case: after over 2 ½ years, we can only continue to guess what made him leave our family all that time ago when he had just turned 14.

I will not give away any further details of the plot of this book, more can be found on the author’s website http://www.rachelbillington.com/ and a review from the Daily Telegraph may be found at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/b…on-review.html The novel can be purchased from Telegraph books via a link on this page.

I am pleased to note that the Telegraph review talks of a “modern preoccupation” with the issue of missing kids. This indicates perhaps that the scale of the problem – 100,000 kids a year in the UK – is finally being noticed. The reviewer makes comment about the “improbability” of the police response, but sadly, this is not as improbable as one may like to think. Rachel’s novel is exceptionally welcome in continuing to raise awareness of this enormous problem in our society and its impact upon families.

The official launch of the novel is on the 10th June 2010 and Rachel has very kindly said she will speak about our son at this event. We are enormously grateful to her for her concern and willingness to help in this way.

Kevin Gosden

Andrew Gosden