Some of the scenes either slightly strain credibility or seem to involve perhaps rather too much coincidence but there is no doubt that they are powerful in their impact and in their message: there is a particularly clever scene I felt when Robert uses the recording of Miserere to convey his understanding of the hurt he has caused to his mother as well as I think starting to understand the need to forgive; and later a very powerful one in Aberfan when he realises that he does not have to stay trapped in his memories. The abrupt engulfing of a Welsh mining village school under a tide of liquid black filth back in the 1960s endures as a particular piece of ghastly British heritage. I was hoping this story would bring a greater understanding of Aberfan, both the disaster itself and the rebuilding of lives afterwards. The Aberfan disaster is hauntingly made real in the descriptions of the work of kind strangers tasked with a terrible job. When a book makes me cry within the first chapter… it just… gahh… I don’t think I will be able to properly convey just how stunning A Terrible Kindness is.

Frankly, it feels a little tasteless – a tragedy bolted on to a conventional 1960s family saga, written and published half a century later. I enjoyed the parts of this book that are set in Cambridge as much as I enjoyed the parts based around the mining disaster in Aberfan. This is a well written debut novel telling a heartfelt story on one man's coming of age after some difficult times.

She is also really good at writing about music; the Welsh song Myfanwy and Allegri’s setting of the Miserere both have a very powerful part to play here and she conveys their power as well as any writing about music I have ever read, as well as the joy and transcendence which can come with performing. I think the story needed to commit to Aberfan, or not bother as the circling back didn't work for me with very little story in the middle. Homosexuality couldn’t come out of the closet in 1966 and it’s a lingering awkwardness between Evelyn and Robert.

Supporting these are friends and family whose patience, acceptance, devotion and love may be unremarked upon but is ever-present. William rushed to Wales with a car load of embalming supplies and chid sized coffins to find not just dead bodies of little children, but bodies covered in slag that had to be cleaned first so parents could identify them.

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