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

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It demonstrates clearly, the numerous opportunities not taken to avert the disaster, with profit and business interests put ahead of community and safeguarding human life.

Whiteman is a less-than-honest copper with a mysterious side-gig, but when he encounters the body, events spiral out of his control. This one did, with the story of a Grenfell resident struggling to escape with his young daughters and heavily pregnant wife.Regulation codes, refurbishment cost savings, the total sum of buildings wrapped in flammable cladding. Whatever the courts eventually decide, this book deserves to be widely read so that the rest of us can finally hold them to account. Martin at least had the decency to express bitter regret for his actions, or lack of them, at the inquiry. It took me longer to read than my average reading pace because some parts were incredibly emotional and heavy to get through.

They aren't only depicted as victims of a fire - (with their/their loved ones' permission), he describes their backstories, careers, families, how they found their way to Grenfell, and more. Its narrative is instead propelled by the lives of the individuals and families that it documents, and to whom it gives dignity. Martin, in Apps’s account, gets neither damnation nor absolution, although it is clear which he deserves. Instead, flames escaped through a gap between the wall and a poorly fitted window and ignited the cladding. Then, it became more complicated: a revisionist account by Andrew O’Hagan in the London Review of Books, which questioned early reporting and tried to rehabilitate the council, was controversial.Really compelling book that finished in a matter of days after seeing it suggested in an article by the editor of the builders merchants journal. Sarah Rennie, a wheelchair user who lives in a block of flats with dangerous cladding, after reading government minutes stating that "stay put advise should be kept in place for disabled residents because they might slow down the evacuation of able-bodied people. This isn’t a story of incompetence: this is a juxtaposition of the value given to capitalism and market principles over human life.

From Knowsley Heights (1991), Lakanal House (July 2009), and multiple fires in Dubai there were warning signs way before June 14, 2017.It would be easy for this book to have good guys and bad guys, and while it does not shy away from apportioning blame — naming companies and individuals who overlooked or deliberately deceived or simply did not care about the factors under their control that led to the fire — it is a book too interested in the truth to seek heroes and villains. You think he’s talking about Grenfell but he’s not: this is Lakanal House in the London borough of Southwark, which burned in 2009, the lessons of which went wilfully unlearned. The narration's truthfulness aids to increase the awareness concerning the systematic mechanism failures that orchestrated the fire's extent. But it would, in one of the most starkly unequal places in the UK, be their neighbors: the residents of Grenfell, who were not rich and mostly not white. For the last few years, Peter Apps has been writing the most important reportage on the most important disaster in this country since Hillsborough.