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

Product Information

The next book to be featured on the Radio 2 Book Club with Steve Wright will be A Terrible Kindness, the powerful and emotional debut novel by Jo Browning Wroe. The book is released on 20 January and Jo will be on the show with Steve on Tuesday 18 January. 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. My congratulations and thanks to the author for her work, thanks too to the publishers Faber and Faber Ltd andNetgalley for the opportunity of reading this digital ARC in exchange for an honest review which it was my pleasure to provide. Louisa Joyner, Associate Publisher, pre-empted UK and Commonwealth rights (excl. Canada) from Sue Armstrong at C&W Agency.

William was the main character and as the book opens he has just completed his training as an embalmer. A celebration is in full swing when news of the terrible Aberfan tragedy is delivered and the embalmers are asked to volunteer their services. William leaves for Wales but his days there, tending to the bodies of the children, are traumatic and have lasting repercussions in the years that follow. This experience wasn't the only one to cause lasting repercussions in Williams life. Some episodes from his time as a chorister resulted in major upheaval and to some extent altered the course of his adult life and indirectly led to his becoming an embalmer. 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. I did not find William's boarding school/choir boy adventures particularly interesting, so I was reading on only for the something that is teased throughout. This is what I struggled with the most. The small parts of the book written about the Aberfan disaster in 1966 were very emotional to read. They were handled sensitively and respectfully and I am aware of what research the author has done. I like that a light has been shone on the work of the volunteer embalmers, something I would never have known about if it wasn't for this book.The characters in A Terrible Kindness demonstrate the complexity of human emotions and motivations. 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). It will be William’s first job as an embalmer and what he experiences over the next few nights in the makeshift mortuary in Aberfan, re-awakens memories of his own childhood trauma. As he tends gently to the bodies of small children dug out from the slurry and witnesses their parent’s grief, “the flotsam and jetsam of his own life is washed up by the tidal wave of Aberfan’s grief.” 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:

It’s utterly magnificent and had to pull car over twice to cry. Intricate cobweb of love, family and friendship, so delicately wrought. Beautiful. A masterclass in character.’ VERONICA HENRY William’s place at the residential choir school of King’s was engineered by his widowed mother. She has a future mapped out for him, which is a very determined diversion from a prospective life in the funeral business, which was the experience of his late father and is still the trade of his father’s twin brother, Uncle Robert. Family history, promises made, complicated relationships, and feelings of disempowerment among those closest to William stretch his loyalties and a sense of his own destiny. 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.

William’s mother says: “My job in life, William, is to love you like no one on earth, and I have to say, I think I’m doing a pretty good job . . .” Is she right? And as his feet fix ever more firmly into that concrete, it is then that the true concepts of family and friendship make themselves known to him. 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.