While taking Gloria around Cambridge, William bumps into Martin again; he later embarks on a redemptive trip to Aberfan. For William his resentment is focused on his mother due to a traumatic event which occurred in the College Chapel culmination of his Cantabrigian choral career – a solo performance of Miserere. William’s mother, Evelyn, helpfully informs him, “There’s a madness that comes with grief”, and Martin is similarly educational: “You shut [music] out as if it was the thing that hurt you, when all along, it’s been the thing that can save you.

But I do not feel the Aberfan disaster was essential to telling this story, which was about a young embalmer William. But compassion can have surprising consequences, because – as William discovers – giving so much to others can sometimes help us heal ourselves.However, for me, the story lost itself by then skipping backwards and forwards to the main character, William's former events in his life. We meet him at an undertaker’s dinner, to which he’s finally had the courage to invite Gloria, the love of his life. 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. But as the guests sip their drinks and smoke their post-dinner cigarettes a telegram delivers news of a tragedy. The way this was written had me hooked from the 1st page and just knew it was going to be a 5 star read.

And the blurb of A Terrible Kindness leans heavily on Aberfan, making you think this is historical fiction about the disaster. William is very much his mother’s son in that he treats people around him badly… I liked Martin, though, uncle Robert and his partner Howard, Gloria with her family, and their interactions. William has the most amazing singing voice, and as a child is offered a place to be trained as a choir boy where he will board with other boys like himself. Time to clamp his defences back down before the flotsam and jetsam of his own life is washed up by the tidal wave of Aberfan’s grief; his father’s death, the abrupt end to his chorister days, the rift with his mother, with Martin. He’s just nineteen and has a bright future with Lavery and Sons, the business run by his uncle Robert, and he’s come top of his class in embalming.

My favourite character was Martin, I loved his resilience and joy of life, his understanding and forgiveness; he was lovely. For those who don't know, in 1966 a huge coal mine spoil tip collapsed down a hillside and engulfed a primary school where 109 children and 5 teachers were killed. William is a character the reader will come to care for, while also being very involved in his life and relationships. There are so many ways in which this could have gone wrong, but Jo Browning Wroe gets it pitch-perfect, I think, never once straying into mawkishness, sentimentality, exploitation, facile psychologising or any other of the traps looming around such a story.

When it circled back to Aberfan at the end, it didn’t have the same emotional resonance for me as at the beginning of the story. Yet the reason given is that Evelyn can’t bear to see her dead husband’s identical twin be “happy in love” when she has been deprived.William also has a horror of having children – which he ascribes to his experiences at Aberfan which leads to an eventual breach with Gloria – at around the point he rediscovers the friendship of Martin. 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. I thought I knew everything there was to know about how 116 children (mostly between the ages of 7 and 10) and 28 adults were killed by the National Coal Board, when 150,000 tonnes of dumped coal slurry buried the small school in a wave that reached up to 80 miles an hour. Homophobia is rampant in the 1960s and it is evident that this must be the main reason why Evelyn (William’s mother) dislikes Robert and Howard and is afraid of their influence on her son.