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

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A Terrible Kindness, however, is the first that I’ve read that focusses on the unseen ‘first responders’ who come into a community to attend to the bodies of the dead in a mass disaster. We journey through William’s life-changing experience in Aberfan, back through his childhood as a chorister at King’s College, Cambridge, and to an Ash Wednesday apocalypse that turned his world upside down. Her approach is the obverse to that of The Crown, which focused, in its 2019 episode Aberfan, on the sluggish political and royal response (which the Queen is said still to regret). I also have memories of Aberfan and have been circling around this novel, wondering whether to read it or not.

A Terrible Kindness by Jo Browning Wroe review - The Guardian

She had made sacrifices to send him to the Cambridge Choir, but for reasons not fully explained until late in the novel, she ruined everything and blighted any career prospects he might have had. 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. 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. What happened in the Welsh valleys that year is enraging, compelling, haunting – for a storyteller, the works.Special mention must go to the recurrent musical threads of Myfanwy and Allegri’s Miserere mei, Deus which are so elegantly woven that only a hard heart would be unmoved. If you'd like to know more about the Aberfan disaster of 1966, Wikipedia has a good article complete with photos of the village after the landslide https://en. But I do not feel the Aberfan disaster was essential to telling this story, which was about a young embalmer William. Not only did I find myself able to play it with both hands, but before long, I didn’t even need the music. It’s a story about facing your demons, trusting in those who love you and helping people when you can.

A Terrible Kindness by Jo Browning Wroe | Waterstones A Terrible Kindness by Jo Browning Wroe | Waterstones

How many could be found, not already busy with other needs, who could drop everything and get there, and then be accommodated somewhere in a small village as well? As the Aberfan disaster begins to fade from living memory, A Terrible Kindness is a promising debut with an important story to tell. It is a novel about life, love, death, and war, set during a time of turbulence and uncertainty across Europe.And to add another coincidence I spent four years at Cambridge – as a mathematician not a chorister (!

A Terrible Kindness by Jo Browning Wroe — Scars Of Tragedy A Terrible Kindness by Jo Browning Wroe — Scars Of Tragedy

William’s love life; an experience of heart-breaking death; his relationship with his mother; his competing and competitive talents — each threatens to derail him.To William’s distress, she is implacably hostile to Uncle Robert, because he is her dead husband’s identical twin. This is what all that performance was about: helping people deal with the shock of mortality knocking you sideways, the question of how on earth to say goodbye, to carry on with any sense of optimism. 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.

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