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'Brilliant, horrifying and really f***ing funny' KATHY BURKE 'Give[s] powerful voice to the often silent story that explains so much of Britain's current fracturing' OBSERVER I'm a scrounger, a liar, a hypocrite, a stain on society with no basic morals - or so they say. After all, what else do you call a working-class single mum in temporary accommodation? The darkly funny debut memoir from the creator of HBO and BBC's Rain Dogs, Skint Estate is a scream against austerity that rises full of rage in a landscape of sink estates, police cells, refuges and peepshows. A voice that must be heard. 'Cash's brutal honesty will leave you wanting to make a change, stand up and be heard. A must-read' VICKY McCLURE 'Extraordinary ... Bursts with energy, wit and anger' KEN LOACH 'The new voice of a generation' THE TIMES 'Astonishingly brilliant ... Raw, gut-wrenching and immensely moving' RUTH JONES 'A fascinating, shocking look at poverty and motherhood' BILLIE PIPER 'A howl of rage ... I loved it' THE IRISH TIMES 'The definition of edgy' LIONEL SHRIVER
'Everyone has their price. It's just not always monetary. Mine is though. 20 quid.' Single mum. 'Stain on society'. Caught in a poverty trap. It's a luxury to afford morals and if you're Cash Carraway, you do what you can to survive. Skint Estate is the hard-hitting, blunt, dignified and brutally revealing debut memoir about impoverishment, loneliness and violence in austerity Britain - set against a grim landscape of sink estates, police cells, refuges and peepshows - skilfully woven into a manifesto for change. Alone, pregnant and living in a women's refuge, Cash Carraway couldn't vote in the 2010 general election that ushered austerity into Britain. Her voice had been silenced. Years late...
Put your headphones on, close your eyes. Embrace the possibility of the life-changing power of music. And perhaps one of these songs will change your life too. Music can inspire our greatest creations, salve our deepest wounds, make us fall in – or out of – love. It can also be a window into another’s soul. Based on the popular live storytelling series, OneTrackMinds is a collection of twenty-five compelling answers to the question, ‘What was the song that changed your life?’ Featuring pieces from a stellar cast of contributors including Peter Tatchell, Inua Ellams, Cash Carraway, Rhik Samadder, Ingrid Oliver and Joe Dunthorne, alongside some of the UK’s most exciting new voices, the book compiles many of the standout stories from the live show so far. Just as rich and varied are the songs themselves, by artists ranging from Nina Simone and Joni Mitchell to Aphex Twin and the Replacements via Tupac, Prince and the Spice Girls. The result is an entertaining, enlightening musical guide to the best of what makes us human.
____________________ The inspiration for the BBC TV series, directed by Shane Meadows and starring Tom Burke, George MacKay and Thomas Turgoose WINNER OF THE 2018 WALTER SCOTT PRIZE ____________________ 'Powerful, visceral writing, historical fiction at its best. Benjamin Myers is one to watch' - Pat Barker 'Phenomenal' - Sebastian Barry 'Superb' - The Times ____________________ From his remote moorland home, David Hartley assembles a gang of weavers and land-workers to embark upon a criminal enterprise that will capsize the economy and become the biggest fraud in British history. They are the Cragg Vale Coiners and their business is 'clipping' – the forging of coins, a treasonous offence punishable by death. When an excise officer vows to bring them down and with the industrial age set to change the face of England forever, Hartley's empire begins to crumble. Forensically assembled, The Gallows Pole is a true story of resistance and a rarely told alternative history of the North. ____________________ 'One of my books of the year ... It's the best thing Myers has done' - Robert Macfarlane, Big Issue Books of the Year
ONE OF TIME’S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR ONE OF NPR’S BEST BOOKS OF 2019 NAMED ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2019 BY WOMAN’S DAY, NEWSDAY, PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, BUSTLE, AND BOOK RIOT! “[B]rilliant, timely, funny, heartbreaking.” —Jojo Moyes, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Me Before You Bridget Jones’s Diary meets Americanah in this disarmingly honest, boldly political, and truly inclusive novel that will speak to anyone who has gone looking for love and found something very different in its place. Queenie Jenkins is a twenty-five-year-old Jamaican British woman living in London, straddling two cultures and slotting neatly into neither. She works at a national newsp...
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'BREATHTAKING' Dolly Alderton, 'REMARKABLE' Marian Keyes, 'LIFE-CHANGING' Emma Jane Unsworth, 'COMPELLING' Amy Liptrot, 'EXTRAORDINARY' Sali Hughes To everyone else, Terri White appeared to be living the dream – living in New York City, with a top job editing a major magazine. In reality, she was struggling with the trauma of an abusive childhood and rapidly skidding towards a mental health crisis that would land her in a psychiatric ward. Coming Undone is Terri's story of her unravelling, and her precarious journey back from a life in pieces.
A critically acclaimed novelist pulls Nick Carraway out of the shadows and into the spotlight in this "masterful" look into his life before Gatsby (Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls and Chances Are). Before Nick Carraway moved to West Egg and into Gatsby's periphery, he was at the center of a very different story-one taking place along the trenches and deep within the tunnels of World War I. Floundering in the wake of the destruction he witnessed firsthand, Nick delays his return home, hoping to escape the questions he cannot answer about the horrors of war. Instead, he embarks on a transcontinental redemptive journey that takes him from a whirlwind Paris romance-d...
'Totally engrossing and deliciously feisty' Bernardine Evaristo A powerful, personal agenda-changing exploration of poverty in today's Britain. 'When every day of your life you have been told you have nothing of value to offer, that you are worth nothing to society, can you ever escape that sense of being 'lowborn' no matter how far you've come?' Kerry Hudson is proudly working class but she was never proudly poor. The poverty she grew up in was all-encompassing, grinding and often dehumanising. Always on the move with her single mother, Kerry attended nine primary schools and five secondaries, living in B&Bs and council flats. She scores eight out of ten on the Adverse Childhood Experiences...
**As heard on BBC Radio 4** ‘I was born on May 25, 1938, in the front bedroom of a house in Orton Road, on the outer edges of Raffles, a council estate. I was a lucky girl.’ So begins Margaret Forster’s journey through the houses she’s lived in, from that sparkling new council house, built as part of a utopian vision by Carlisle City Council, to her beloved London house of today, via Oxford, Hampstead, the Lake District and a spell in the Mediterranean. This is not a book about bricks and mortar, or about how a house becomes a home with the right scatter of cushions. This is a book about what houses are to us, the effect they have on the way we live our lives. It is also a wonderful backwards glace at the changing nature of our accommodation: from blacking grates and outside privies; to cities dominated by bedsits and lodgings; to houses today being converted back into single dwellings, all open-plan spaces and bringing the outside in. Finally, it is a gently insistent, personal inquiry into the meaning of home.