‘ Fascinating . . . Crowds will form’ MARGARET ATWOOD, on X
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Peer through the enormous window and you will see twelve marble slabs.
On each slab lies a corpse.
For over one hundred years, from 1804, the unknown dead of Paris were publicly displayed at the world’ s first morgue. Wherever they were found, their bodies were brought to the morgue and laid out for exhibition in the hope that one of the many visitors – overa million a year – might identify them.
Told across twelve overlapping stories, Morgue brings the long-forgotten dead back to life. These are the ordinary inhabitants of nineteenth-century Paris – laundry women, day labourers, widows, writers, courtesans – and through them, Catriona Byers unspools a gripping and immersive narrative of a city in turmoil and a society in flux.
Drawing on over a decade of research, Byers presents a panoramic view of the glittering underbelly of Paris. Through true tales of crime, tragedy, murder and revenge, she reveals how the century’ s greatest breakthroughs – from photography and forensics to horror fiction and psychology – were born of human struggles with love, loss and the relentless search for a better future.
Morgue is an intimate study of human ingenuity and art, loneliness and grief – of all that moves us, and the shadows we cast. It is a landmark debut offering an electrifying account of the birth of modern life.
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‘ This gripping, indeed often thrilling, work by Catriona Byers proves that well-researched, pacily written works of sociological history can indeed make crackingly good books’ ANDREW ROBERTS, author of Napoleon and His Marshals
