Peter Apps’ Show Me the Bodies is an unflinching, meticulously researched account of one of the most devastating tragedies in recent British history. It’s a book that doesn’t just tell you what happened, it lays bare the human, systemic and institutional failures that made it possible. Apps’ work is not sensationalist, but it is deeply affecting. As you turn the pages, the anger builds, the disbelief grows, and by the end, the horror is matched only by a sense of bitter inevitability.
The book centres, of course, on the fire at Grenfell Tower on 14 June 2017, in which 72 people lost their lives. But Show Me the Bodies is not just a forensic timeline of that awful night. It’s a study in complicity, a layered and unrelenting examination of the catalogue of warnings, cost-cutting decisions, hollow promises and political negligence that preceded it. Apps connects the dots between the deregulation of safety standards, corporate corner-cutting and a government too often driven by ideology or inertia, and shows how each of these threads wove the shroud that ultimately covered Grenfell.
One of the most powerful things about this book is its accessibility. Apps doesn’t bog the reader down in impenetrable technical language, despite the complex subject matter. He writes with clarity and directness, which makes it all the more harrowing. You don’t need a background in housing policy, construction or fire safety to grasp the gravity of what he’s saying. And perhaps that’s part of the point, the people who should have known better did know better, and still chose to look the other way.
Yes, there are moments where the writing feels repetitive, but it’s deliberate. The repetition mirrors the experience of residents whose warnings were repeatedly ignored, and reflects the sheer volume of missed chances to intervene. Apps is hammering the point home because the system failed over and over again, in nearly identical ways. The pattern becomes impossible to ignore, and it’s exhausting, as it should be.
This is not an easy read. It is infuriating, it is upsetting, and at times it’s almost too much. But it is essential. Not just as a historical document, but as a moral reckoning. Show Me the Bodies forces us to confront how a society, through austerity, deregulation and indifference, can become complicit in the deaths of its most vulnerable. It makes you look differently at the buildings around you, at the labels on the materials, at the priorities of those in power. It forces you to ask: who is really being protected?
Please read this book. It’s important. It will disturb you, it may enrage you, but it will open your eyes and that is the least we owe the people of Grenfell.