A Terrible Kindness: The Bestselling Richard and Judy Book Club Pick

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Browning Wroe easily evokes both setting and era with gorgeous descriptive prose and popular culture references. The friendships, losses, relationships and family are the core of the story, but underneath it all is the experience that the character has in the first few chapters, and the scars that are carved into him; that of attending Aberfan in October 1966 as a freshly qualified embalmer.

But as the guests sip their drinks and smoke their post-dinner cigarettes a telegram delivers news of a tragedy. There’s a great cast of characters - I liked kindly uncle Robert and jolly irreverent school friend Martin, and admired Gloria who bravely put up with William’s sometimes awful behaviour. The first thing to say is that it resolutely isn’t: it is, in fact, the kind of novel I used to enjoy reading off my grandparents’ shelves, a domestic saga about a young man struggling to overcome his childhood while joining the family business. But compassion can have surprising consequences, because – as William discovers – giving so much to others can sometimes help us heal ourselves.

Framed around the tragedy of Aberfan, but not hugely about Aberfan, this felt a bit over complicated and clunky. On 21 October 1966, the primary school at Aberfan in Wales was engulfed in slag from the slippage of a coal mining dump on the hill behind the town. A Terrible Kindness is among the best books I have read this year and I can recommend it very warmly indeed. In the final third of the book a series of set piece scenes and important conversations cause William to come to terms with the hurt in his life, his anger and guilt and to start to forgive himself and others and seek to repair and heal his various broken relationships.

A giant slag heap has collapsed, engulfing the primary school and killing over a hundred people, mostly children.Much of the story has little to do with Aberfan, but then perhaps that’s true of lots of wider events that can affect a character, like war for instance. So, from the very beginning, we are aware that William has an unusual job but also that he does it well and that he is a kind, thoughtful young man, who wishes to give the victims, and their families, respect and to do his tasks with care. Robert Lavery was her husband’s twin brother, a living breathing reminder of what she has lost, and Howard, also in the business is Robert’s other half.

After the powerful beginning, we spend the rest of the book moving between William's past at boarding school and the present where something has happened to make him estranged from his mum.Sentences such as “the roast pork … moved from William’s plate, to his mouth, to his stomach easily”, or “Ray’s baby is nestled inside her warm body”, sound like faltering translations, while the description “Aberfan is black, white or grey” will seem cursory to anyone who has seen images of the landslide. William was the main character and as the book opens he has just completed his training as an embalmer.

The way this was written had me hooked from the 1st page and just knew it was going to be a 5 star read. When it circled back to Aberfan at the end, it didn’t have the same emotional resonance for me as at the beginning of the story. There are so many ways in which this could have gone wrong, but Jo Browning Wroe gets it pitch-perfect, I think, never once straying into mawkishness, sentimentality, exploitation, facile psychologising or any other of the traps looming around such a story.because while I didn’t love it, I would recommend it as an original character-led story that explores a side of disasters that we don’t hear much about.