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

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A Terrible Kindness is among the best books I have read this year and I can recommend it very warmly indeed. 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. It will be his first job, and will be - although he's yet to know it - a choice that threatens to sacrifice his own happiness.

It only tells me you know the rest of your novel is not as strong as those banging opening chapters. I found it difficult to read at first but the story moves away so quickly I found it wasn’t really a book about the disaster at all. ACT Contact / FAQ About Events / Videos Merch / Subs Sign in/up A Terrible Kindness : One of the most hotly anticipated books of 2022 Browning Wroe, Jo More by this author. Similarly, his treatment of Gloria – which he blames on Aberfan – seems to trivialize the real tragedy there (parents losing their children) as William commandeers it to justify his own loss of innocence.The story is told in flashbacks to William’s childhood as a chorister at a boarding school in Cambridge and I think this is where the book fell down for me. It all culminates in what I found to be a very anticlimactic-- and predictable, for that matter --scene.

Volunteering at such a horrendous disaster changes William and Gloria's lives, but in a bad, or good way? There are some special bonds like the one with his school friend Martin and his uncle Robert and his partner Howard. For anyone not familiar, an avalanche of coal waste on a rain soaked mountain engulfed a town and primary school in Aberfan, Wales in 1966, killing 144 people, the vast majority of whom were young children.With much of the story focused on William's time as a chorister at Cambridge, his relationship with his mother, Martin and Gloria, I don't see why this is marketed as "The Aberfan book" other than to just sell more copies. I was probably in primary school myself when we were first told of this all-to-recent local history, and so I will undoubtedly have had a different experience to a lot of my reading buddies during those chapters, the site of Pantglas Junior School just 5.

Homosexuality couldn’t come out of the closet in 1966 and it’s a lingering awkwardness between Evelyn and Robert. The novel affords limited emotional access to him, often relating the bare facts of events without letting the reader in on their impact. There are a number of interesting characters: Martin, his best friend from boarding school and William's uncle. This novel addresses some very difficult themes, but author Jo Browning Wroe, uses a deft touch and never strays into over-sentimentality.

William is a character the reader will come to care for, while also being very involved in his life and relationships.