Show Me the Bodies: WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING 2023

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Apps’s chief claim is that people who lived in Grenfell died because of a series of choices consciously made by political representatives who “deliberately ran down, neglected and privatised arms of the state,” something they did hand in hand with “a corporate world that evinced an almost psychopathic disregard for human life. Drawing on interviews and materials presented to the inquiry, Apps follows the stories of a number of residents across the night of the fire. It's a book that will want to make you want to scream with frustration and weep for the lives cut short and for the grief of those who survived.

This isn’t a story of incompetence: this is a juxtaposition of the value given to capitalism and market principles over human life. An elderly man describes how he thought his wife was “out of his league” when they first met; a family expecting a new baby says they were feeling close as the due date neared; a mother talks about how special her relationship with her adult daughter was. It seems to have caught a touch of Victorian-itis, with everyone giving it the full over-the-top period drama treatment.This concentration on the personal lives and experiences of the residents serves as a rebuke to the logic that brought about the disaster. Seventy-eight people were killed by a collision of forces with one common root: the broad contempt showed by people with power towards those without it.

This is not comfortable bedtime reading, but essential for those seeking to grasp the multiple causes of failure which culminated in the deadly Grenfell Tower fire. Apps in alternating chapters tells both the harrowing story of what happened on the night of the fire, but also how Grenfell’s owner came to clad it in what was in effect solid petrol, how such products came to be on the market… Ultimately Grenfell was a failure of regulation, or more precisely of deregulation, and of fear of offending business interests.Similar to Five Past Midnight in Bhopal, the tie ins of personal lives affected made the book even more emotional. Even now, “stay put” remains – against the advice of phase one of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, which recommended that building owners must by law create personal emergency evacuation plans. They had a “core of solid petrol”, and were fitted a year earlier for insulation and aesthetic purposes (one Kensington and Chelsea councillor is on record deciding between “Champagne” and “British Racing Green” colours).