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.

Shows how the English working class emerged through the degradations of the industrial revolution to create a culture and political consciousness of enormous vitality.

Miles Roby, a gentle, funny loser, runs the Empire Grill and hopes one day to own it. Meantime, though, his wife has run off with his worst customer, he's anxious about his adored teenage daughter and his one-handed brother, and his incorrigible father sponges off everyone.

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists tells the story of a group of working men who are joined one day by Owen, a journeyman-prophet with a vision of a just society. Owen's spirited attacks on the greed and dishonesty of the capitalist system rouse his fellow men from their political quietism.

Reissue of a groundbreaking work of fiction from one of our best loved authors.

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.

With a new introduction by Richard Bradford. Alan Sillitoe's classic novel of the 1950s, reissued to coincide with the 50th anniversary of its original publication.

Zola's masterpiece of working life, Germinal (1885), exposes the inhuman conditions of miners in northern France in the 1860s. By Zola's death in 1902 it had come to symbolise the call for freedom from oppression so forcefully that the crowd which gathered at his State funeral chanted 'Germinal! Germinal!'. The central figure, Etienne Lantier, is an outsider who enters the community and ...

A terrifying encounter with an escaped convict in a graveyard on the wild Kent marshes; a summons to meet the bitter, decaying Miss Havisham and her beautiful, cold-hearted ward Estella; the sudden generosity of a mysterious benefactor - these form a series of events that change the orphaned Pip's life forever.

Trainspotting

This account of US history from the bottom up tells the real story of the people, rather than the flag-waving official story.

The story of a working class alongside the epic history of the global labour movement, from its formation in the factories of the 1800s to its near destruction by fascism in the 1930s. This book uncovers parallels between the issues that confronted the original anti-capitalists and those who have taken to the streets in Seattle, Genoa and beyond.

Ashley couldn't care less about the prom - but when disaster strikes and she finds herself drawn in to organising it, she discovers a little about getting things done and as well as rather a lot about herself.

Features an American memoir of growing up in New York with eccentric uncles.

Reprints the 1974 classic that became the standard text for such areas of sociology as the science of managerial control, the relationship of technological innovation to social class, and the eradication of skill from work under capitalism. Having worked at a number of crafts in the metal industry,

This is Engel's best known work, and is still in many ways the best study of the working class in Victorian England. What Cobbett had done for agricultural poverty in his Rural Rides , Engels did in this work on the plight of industrial workers in England in the 1840s.

Identifies and describes an overlooked cultural phenomenon: the internal conflict within individuals raised in blue-collar homes, now living white-collar lives. The author informs his account with personal experience and interviews with other professionals living in limbo.

Provides an account of the growth of the lesbian community in Buffalo, New York from the mid-1930s to the early 1960s. The books draws on oral histories collected from 45 women.