To generations of people in Britain the name of the Welsh village of Aberfan evokes more tragedy than its flat syllables should allow. On October 21, 1966, a mound of coal waste slid down a hillside and engulfed Pantglas Junior School and the nearby houses, killing 116 children and 28 adults.

A Terrible Kindness by Jo Browning Wroe | Waterstones

William's character has so much depth. I really felt I was accompanying him on his journey as he worked through his conflicting and difficult emotions. There are a number of interesting characters: Martin, his best friend from boarding school and William's uncle. There is no question that Jo Browning Wroe who, at age 58, has written her first novel (as a woman of a certain age, I love when that happens!) has writing chops.Kindness, honesty and integrity are traits which run through William from a young age, and these characteristics attract similar souls.

Book club: A Terrible Kindness by Jo Browning Wroe

The restorative power of music is most clearly shown however when William revisits Cambridge to discover his friend is the organiser of a choir formed from the city’s homeless population. William challenges the idea of men who have nothing being asked to sing about love and loss but his friend’s belief is that these are exactly the sentiments the men should be able to voice: Oh my goodness! Being chosen by The Reading Agency for Radio 2’s Book Club is such an honour. I’m incredibly proud not only that A Terrible Kindness will be discussed by this highly respected book club, but also that it will be sitting on library shelves across the country. 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. Some of the scenes either slightly strain credibility or seem to involve perhaps rather too much coincidence but there is no doubt that they are powerful in their impact and in their message: there is a particularly clever scene I felt when Robert uses the recording of Miserere to convey his understanding of the hurt he has caused to his mother as well as I think starting to understand the need to forgive; and later a very powerful one in Aberfan when he realises that he does not have to stay trapped in his memories. There were indoor playgrounds, too: a well-equipped office, especially appreciated on those endless Sunday afternoons. I enjoyed the electric typewriter, shooting its letters like bullets at the lightest of touches; the adding machine that printed out sums with a satisfying grind; and the sniffable felt tip pens. Best by far, though, was the little telephone switchboard, with compact levers to snap up and down, illuminating tiny red and green lights. But as the guests sip their drinks and smoke their post-dinner cigarettes a telegram delivers news of a tragedy. An event so terrible it will shake the nation. It is October 1966 and a landslide at a coal mine has buried a school: Aberfan.This is a well written debut novel telling a heartfelt story on one man's coming of age after some difficult times. It wasn't so much about the Aberfan disaster as about the effects of PTSD on those who are involved in recovering bodies after such disasters. I felt the novel would have benefitted by dealing with the Aberfan disaster more sensitively by integrating it into the rest of the novel, rather than putting it aside until the end of the novel, when the aftermath and subsequent inquiry had such a big impact on the UK at the time. I would also recommend this recording of Allegri’s Miserere which is crucial to the plot of the book as well as its themes – listen in particular to the tenor solo at for example 1:30 To be fair, I probably should have known not to venture near A Terrible Kindness given its mawkish appearance, but I was very intrigued by the mention of Aberfan.

A Terrible Kindness by Jo Browning Wroe | Waterstones A Terrible Kindness by Jo Browning Wroe | Waterstones

One very minor point: you did a typo in that the soaring solo in the Allegri Miserere is a boy soprano, not a tenor. Throughout the book we’re given hints that some calamity befell William when he was a boy, causing him to leave Cambridge abruptly without completing a coveted scholarship scholarship at a university choir school . It’s not until the final chapters do we learn what happened, and why this has caused William so much anguish over the years. In 1966, a colliery spoil tip above the Welsh village of Aberfan collapsed; 116 children and 28 adults were killed when the village was buried under a wave of slurry. Jo Browning Wroe’s debut novel, A Terrible Kindness, purports to be the story of a young embalmer who attends the disaster. 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. In general I found William a difficult main character to warm to and some events difficult to wrap my head around. Some parts of the middle of the story I found boring and frustrating.

Special mention must go to the recurrent musical threads of Myfanwy and Allegri’s Miserere mei, Deus which are so elegantly woven that only a hard heart would be unmoved. The book was selected with the help of a panel of library staff from across the UK. Our readers loved A Terrible Kindness – here are some of their comments: The author gave an excellent introduction to and summary of the book in an interview with Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge where she is creative writing supervisor (having previously done an MA at the UEA in 2000 – in WG Sebald’s last year).