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.
Mentally scarred by Aberfan, William Lavery tries, unsuccessfully, to break up with his girlfriend Gloria, and tells her he will never want to have children. The story then spools back to his chorister childhood in Cambridge, his falling out with his best friend, Martin, when Martin more or less assaults him in his sleep, and his determination never to sing again after inviting his uncle, who is gay, and his uncle’s partner to hear him at a service. His mother makes a scene on discovering them there, and William ends up moving in with his uncles. While taking Gloria around Cambridge, William bumps into Martin again; he later embarks on a redemptive trip to Aberfan.
