Millions of Americans work full-time, year-round, for poverty level wages. Journalist Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them in order to find out how anyone survives on six dollars an hour. So began a gruelling, hair-raising and darkly funny odyssey though the underworld of working America.

'Walls has carved a story with precision and grace out of one of the most chaotic, heart-breaking childhoods... This deeply affecting memoir is a triumph in every possible way, and it does what all good books should: it affirms our faith in the human spir

Stunning reissue of the phenomenal worldwide bestseller: Frank McCourt's sad, funny, bittersweet memoir of growing up in New York in the 30s and in Ireland in the 40s.

A memoir of the author's time among the desperately poor and destitute in London and Paris. It documents a world of unrelenting drudgery and squalor - sleeping in bug-infested hostels and doss houses, working as a dishwasher in the vile 'Hotel X', living alongside tramps, surviving on scraps and cigarette butts.

Francie Nolan is a Brooklyn girl with a Brooklyn name and a Brooklyn accent. Her family are brave, devoted immigrants, struggling to survive and rise above the squalor, poverty and violence that surround their tenement home.

Jeffrey Sachs draws on his remarkable 25 years' experience to offer a thrilling and inspiring vision of the keys to economic success in the world today.

Set against the background of dust bowl Oklahoma and Californian migrant life, this novel tells the story of the Joad family, who, like thousands of others, are forced to travel West in search of the promised land.

Tells the story of Junior, a budding cartoonist who leaves his school on the Spokane Indian Reservation to attend an all-white high school.

Set in mid-1970s India, a subtle and compelling narrative about four unlikely characters who come together in circumstances no one could have foreseen soon after the government declares a 'State of Internal Emergency'. It is a breathtaking achievement: panoramic yet humane, intensely political yet rich with local delight.

Scathing in its indictment of a cruel society, and pervaded by an unforgettable sense of threat and mystery, this novel is peopled with some of memorable characters (the arch-villain Fagin, the artful Dodger, the menacing Bill Sikes and the prostitute Nancy). It combines the elements of Gothic Romance, the Newgate Novel and popular melodrama.

Presents an account of the author's observations of working-class life in the bleak industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Lancashire in the 1930s. It provides descriptions of social injustice, cramped slum housing, dangerous mining conditions, squalor, hunger and growing unemployment.

One of the best works of investigative journalism in years, 'Random Family' tells the story of growing up in the Latino ghettos of the Bronx, a story of drug-dealers, young mothers, poverty and violence, a family saga like no other.

The personal story of the man who founded the system of micro-credit , Banker to the Poor tells the story of how he did it. Today Yunus's system of micro-credit is practiced in some 60 countries, including the US, Canada and France and his Grameen Bank is now a billion-pound business.

In the summer of 1936, Agee and Evans set out on assignment for Fortune magazine to explore the daily lives of sharecroppers in the South. This book provides a record of the place, of the people who shaped the land, and of the rhythm of their lives.

This text is a revised edition of Dostoyevsky's classic tale. Rasholnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse or regret. As he embarks on a dangerous cat and mouse game, he is pursued by his conscience.

Describes the author's time living with the gangs on the Southside of Chicago. This book tells how in the Robert Taylor Homes projects on Chicago's South Side, he befriends JT, a gang leader for the Black Kings. It also tells how he gains JT's trust, and in order to convince the author of his CEO-like qualities, JT makes him leader of the gang.