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

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As he sits next to the window on the tired upholstery, with a spring nudging him in the backside, William is unexpectedly overwhelmed with a sense of his mother.

But as the guests sip their drinks and smoke their post-dinner cigarettes a telegram delivers news of a tragedy. As an aside I initially felt this was an authorial misstep to withold the information about what happened in the incident from the reader when it is known to all of the book’s characters even those not there like William’s later wife Gloria (the daughter of another undertaking/embalming dynasty) – but I think this is so that we can first of all understand its consequences and judge for ourselves if it fits the incident (which while not doubt hugely mortifying should not have lead to a lifetime of damage). However, it is 1966, and the tragedy at Aberfan is unfolding, with elbalmers needed in the small town.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. The story of William Lavery opens at a flashy dinner in 1966 where he is celebrating his qualification, aged 18, to be an embalmer and to work with the newly dead before their funerals.

I’m damned if I’m going to look for songs that aren’t about love and life and loss and pain and joy.

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. Living in Wales, this is still a very sensitive subject, and I'm not sure this has the sensitivity that those passages need. As a reading experience, I felt I disengaged a little – you can get a little frustrated with William – and the story lags a little. 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. In fact, William is a very talented choirist, trained at one of the best schools in Cambridge, and singled out to sing the most prestigious solo there.