I found it difficult to read at first but the story moves away so quickly I found it wasn’t really a book about the disaster at all. 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. With classics such as Ted Hughes's The Iron Man and award-winners including Emma Carroll's Letters from the Lighthouse, Faber Children's Books brings you the best in picture books, young reads and classics. This is a well written debut novel telling a heartfelt story on one man's coming of age after some difficult times. 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.

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.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). There’s a great cast of characters - I liked kindly uncle Robert and jolly irreverent school friend Martin, and admired Gloria who bravely put up with William’s sometimes awful behaviour.

It was only recently that I had even heard of the Aberfan tradegy, so when I read the blurb I was very intrigued to read this novel. 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 read this novel as part of a Readalong over on Instagram, and it was interesting to hear what others know of the terrible Aberfan disaster. A fair chunk of the book is preoccupied with the homophobia of the period, which is well drawn, but presented without comment, so that for sustained periods the reader is simply wading through pages of anti-gay prejudice; a strangely dated experience. His way of dealing with these situations was to sever ties rather than to mend relationships and at times I wanted to shake him.As well as William’s gentle, caring nature, I also loved Martin’s cheeky character and the man he became. While taking Gloria around Cambridge, William bumps into Martin again; he later embarks on a redemptive trip to Aberfan. So we are aware that he has a difficult relationship with his mother, for example, but are unaware until later why this is. Supporting these are friends and family whose patience, acceptance, devotion and love may be unremarked upon but is ever-present.