Time’s passing has done little to dim the horror of the 1966 Aberfan disaster, in which thousands of tonnes of coal waste thundered down a mountainside and engulfed a Welsh junior school. The sentiments it so powerfully evokes inform the opening of Jo Browning Wroe’s debut novel, A Terrible Kindness, which begins as hope of finding survivors dwindles.
Responding to the appeal for help, newly qualified undertaker William Lavery, 19, loads a hearse with embalming fluids and heartbreakingly small coffins, and drives through the night from his Uncle Robert’s Midlands funeral home. There are still 140 bodies to rescue, most of them children, and the scenes he witnesses are captured in a sequence of crisply etched images, some plucked from history, others from the author’s imagination.
