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

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It’s an eerie thought, but when disaster strikes, who steps in to help? To organize others, to support the survivors, to bring the dead to their loved ones. Easthope tells of her own journey joining Kenyon, an international recognized disaster management company that are called to repatriate the dead. Along the way she provides detailed insight to an industry that is barely known. Ones own morality is tested here. The work of pathologists certainly was an eye opener. But then, understanding why pigeons the biggest issue at the accident scene shows how incredibly little is known dealing with the dead in mass numbers. 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. King, David (April 2021). "Book Review: The Recovery Myth". Australian Journal of Emergency Management. 36 (2): 18 . Retrieved 27 November 2022.

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. As one of the world's leading experts on disaster, she has been at the centre of the most seismic events of the last few decades - advising on everything from the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami to the 7/7 bombings, the Salisbury poisonings, the Grenfell fire and the COVID-19 pandemic. This was a book I got up early and stayed up late for. A fascinating memoir from Professor Lucy Easthope on her work as a disaster advisor. But part of the book’s importance is in its insightful exploration of what human beings need to preserve their resilience. Easthope is consistently interested in the long-term rebuilding of whatever habitat has been destroyed – the internal domain of feeling and memories as much as the external. She borrows an illuminating phrase about the “furniture of self” from the sociologist Kai Erikson, and the evocative Welsh word hiraeth to describe the yearning for a lost place where we know we are at home. Human beings are embedded in place and body, their humanity is shaped around things, sights and sounds, flesh and blood. Such metacommentary is common as Easthope balances her influence on and role within the infrastructure of disaster response with its good intentions and inevitable shortcomings.Whilst it could be a bit of a grim read at times, depictions of bodies decomposing, the way autopsies and mortuaries work, finding and cataloging remains and personal items after disaster. However, it was also a real look at the humanity of death and disaster, of communities coming together, of the very secret 'Cinderella service' of an entire operation of disaster experts, police, search and rescue, the fire brigade, paramedics, funeral directors, the list really does go on. I'm a disaster expert – and it helped me get through my own ( BBC News Outlook Podcast, March 2022)

the people who remain long after the climax of initial disaster. People such as Lucy Easthope, who dwell in the places most of us can only imagine. Laura KennedyWith profound compassion and empathy throughout, the actual work undertaken knowing what they are handling is chilling. Easthope recalls sorting limbs with boots attached, when British soldiers were returned from the war in Iraq. She also tells of gathering limbs in frantic panic after given just 30 minutes in a war zone, after a plane blown out of the sky,