‘Fascinating . . . Crowds will form’ MARGARET ATWOOD, on X

*

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.

*

‘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