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

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In the opening chapters of A Terrible Kindness, they dutifully arrive with embalming fluid, technical paraphernalia, and tiny coffins, travelling through the night from all over the UK to ‘take care of the dead’ with the sombre focus of their profession. 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. As you can imagine, so many books cross my path at work that I never get the time to look into. This was one. To William, the intricacies of embalming are logical and calm and provide both an escape from and a framework for the more unpredictable elements of his life – his love for the beautiful and patient Gloria, and his dear and mischievous friend Martin.

A Terrible Kindness | Faber A Terrible Kindness | Faber

Family plays a huge part in this story, the dynamics of relationships, love, death and acceptance. It has it all and with such powerful writing that every person feels real. Every event affected me. This story isn’t just memorable. It is unforgettable. It is perfection. 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. How marvellous it is when a book broadens your horizons, takes you to places you would never envisage yourself going, and provides you with an enjoyable reading experience all at the same time. A Terrible Kindness by Jo Browning Wroe did all of that for me. Horizons were broadened when I learnt about the 1966 Aberfan tragedy which resulted in the deaths of 116 children and 28 adults. I'd never considered the life of a boy chorister boarding and training at Cambridge and I certainly never envisaged being taken into the world of an embalmer. Granted this was all via a work of fiction but it propelled me toward an evening of Googling and YouTubing once I'd finished the book. I truly appreciated listening to the magnificent sounds of various Cambridge choir renditions of Miserere and Myfanwy two songs regularly mentioned in the book. However all I've mentioned so far was the icing on the cake. The book itself was well written with interesting characters having to handle difficult situations and I was super impressed to learn this was a debut novel.Supporting these are friends and family whose patience, acceptance, devotion and love may be unremarked upon but is ever-present. Eyes may well up and throats may clog with emotion in later scenes: only the hard of heard will fail to be moved and uplifted by this exceptional debut novel. Days later, with no sleep and only short breaks for crab paste sandwiches and whisky-laced tea, his life had changed utterly, in a way he could not have predicted. Examining masculinity and intimacy, love and loss, trauma and recovery, this story, seen through William’s eyes, is beautifully, insightfully, and respectfully told. A Terrible Kindness is sentimental to many a fault. In the Aberfan sections alone, its approach doesn’t seem out of place: the bereaved parents are true pictures of grief, and later, the words on their children’s graves have a plaintive naïveté. But away from there, in Cambridge or London, this Faber “lead debut” reads like average young-adult fare. What happened in the Welsh valleys that year is enraging, compelling, haunting – for a storyteller, the works. The great Aberfan novel, however, is apparently yet to come. 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.

A Terrible Kindness by Jo Browning Wroe review – a saga

Following his late father into the family firm was an act of devastating rebellion against his mother’s ambitions for him and his singing gift. Kindness, honesty and integrity are traits which run through William from a young age, and these characteristics attract similar souls. I may have made the book sound a difficult read; in fact, it’s anything but. I was completely engrossed and always wanted to read just a bit more. Wroe’s prose (in the present tense) is poised and unobtrusively brilliant, I think, so that everything from the strongest emotions to the feel of Cambridge in the early 70s (and I was there, so I know) is excellently but quietly done.

James Meek is an award-winning British novelist and journalist. He is currently a contributing editor to the London Review of Books. His best-known book, published in more than 30 countries, is The People’s Act of Love. It was nominated for the Man Booker Prize and won both the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Scottish Arts Council Award. The author was born in England, but grew up in Dundee and attended Edinburgh University. It was during his time as a student in the 1980s that he published his first collection of short stories. I enjoyed the role of music in the book, as redemption for both William and Martin. As well as William’s gentle, caring nature, I also loved Martin’s cheeky character and the man he became. The novel really made me feel William’s pain both at losing his musical future and the PTSD he suffered after Aberfan. I admired the author’s gentle touch in dealing with William’s issues but did feel he was somewhat immature and stubborn in his relationships with his mother and his wife Gloria, while everyone around him seemed to be so tolerant and forgiving of his behaviour for so long. This is a very original book which has managed to bring together the diverse topics of the Aberfan disaster, the life of a boy chorister and embalming as a career choice and meld them into a delightful novel.