When the Dust Settles: THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER. 'A marvellous book' -- Rev Richard Coles

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Twenty-eight years later, I am on my way to a very different disaster scene, no longer an onlooker, but here to size up the scale of what is to be faced and what can be done about it.

When a plane crashes, a bomb explodes, a city floods or a pandemic begins, Lucy Easthope's phone starts to ring... Out of the dust: Britain’s leading disaster expert on coping with crisis (edited extract from When the Dust Settles, The Guardian, March 2022) I'd definitely recommend this book (I've already told my dad to read it). It is hard to read and very sad at times but there is a lot of hope and promise there too and the stories of so many people who are out there fighting to do better and to make disaster recovery stronger and more community focused than it is now.One deeply saddening example is Easthope’s description of distressed children who lived near Grenfell Tower. Looking out of their bedroom window, some of the children saw the silhouettes of police officers carrying large bags and assumed they were bodies.

She is the author of When the Dust Settles: Stories of Love, Loss and Hope from an Expert in Disaster and The Recovery Myth: The Plans and Situated Realities of Post-Disaster Response. With wisdom, resilience and candour, When the Dust Settles lifts us up by showing that humanity, hope and humour can – and must – be found on the darkest days.

This was evident in the property left in the aftermath of the London 7/7 bombings. Easthope lists items such as Tupperware with salads inside, laptops and an unfinished PhD thesis, still being annotated up until the point when the bomb exploded. These objects are reminders that it was a normal commute until it wasn’t. This beautifully written, heartfelt book is not an easy read. Lucy Easthope is a remarkable person and the story of her career in disaster recovery, intertwined with her personal memoir, is, in turn, horrifying, saddening and ultimately inspiring. Her overwhelming purpose of caring for those caught up in disasters (all sadly familiar names to us), both the living and the dead, is a force for great good but the work that she and the teams with which she works is little known and therefore sadly underrated. This book should be widely read to correct that. All this difficult and imagination-stretching work underlines the conviction that we must be serious about our “furniture” and our “habitat”. To respect and love one another is a matter of finding meaning in the physical stuff of ourselves and our world. Our responses need to be as “layered” as the reality before us: “Disasters don’t happen in societal isolation,” Easthope writes: what looks like the same kind of catastrophe may be significantly different because of this. Within her accounts she also provides moving glimpses into her own personal life. I have to admit within seconds of listening to this book I felt a kinship to Lucy upon hearing her recount a Liverpudlian childhood steeped in the Hillsborough tragedy. Growing up as a Liverpool fan in the North West of England just a stones throw away from Liverpool her words resonated on a deep personal level. Knowing that her life’s work has been inspired and driven by this tragedy is a testimony to her character. Easthope conveys the wretched physicality without veering into vulgarity or callousness. Still, she is frank in the extreme