Show Me the Bodies

WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING 2023

'Never before, in years of reviewing books about buildings, has one brought me to tears. This one did.' Rowan Moore, Observer Book of the Week

On 14 June 2017, a 24-storey block of flats went up in flames.

The fire climbed up cladding as flammable as solid petrol. Fire doors failed to self-close. No alarm rang out to warn sleeping residents. As smoke seeped into their homes, all were told to ‘stay put’. Many did – and they died.

It was a tragedy decades in the making.

Peter Apps meticulously exposes how a steady stream of deregulation, corporate greed and institutional indifference caused a tragedy. 72 people did not need to die, as the Grenfell Tower Inquiry makes clear. Here is the story of a grieving community forsaken by our government, a community still waiting for justice.

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'Enormously important… A painstaking chronicle of an entirely avoidable tragedy, its aftermath and its causes.' JAMES O'BRIEN

'Show Me the Bodies will never leave the mind of anyone who reads it.' GUARDIAN

'A searing indictment of the construction industry and regulators… The book that follows reads like a prosecution, meticulous and fierce.' THE TIMES