Showing titles in Poverty & Homelessness

Ever since he was a kid, kicking broken footballs on the streets of East London in the shadow of Canary Wharf's skyscrapers, Gary wanted something better. Something a whole lot bigger. Then he won a competition run by a bank: 'The Trading Game'. The prize: a golden ticket to a new life, as the youngest trader in the whole city. A place where you could make more money than you'd ever imagined. Where your colleagues are dysfunctional maths geniuses, overfed public schoolboys and borderline psychopaths, yet they start to feel like family.

As the middle of five kids growing up in dire poverty, the odds were low on Katriona O'Sullivan making anything of her life. She became a mother at 15 and ended up homeless. Five rackety years followed - barely coping, drinking to escape - until Katriona, now living in her father's native Dublin, hit rock bottom. Poor is the extraordinary story - moving, funny, brave, and sometimes startling - of how Katriona turned her life around.

Just days after Raynor learns that Moth, her husband of 32 years, is terminally ill, the couple lose their home and their livelihood. With nothing left and little time, they make the brave and impulsive decision to walk the 630 miles of the sea-swept South West Coast Path, from Somerset to Dorset via Devon and Cornwall. They have almost no money for food or shelter and must carry only the essentials for survival on their backs as they live wild in the ancient, weathered landscape of cliffs, sea and sky.

With a career spanning 10 years inside the walls of Britain's most infamous prisons – Manchester’s Strangeways and London’s Wormwood Scrubs – John Sutton has experienced it all. Attacked by The Soho Vampire an insane killer, assaulted by The Cambridge Rapist, threatened by The IRA, beaten, persecuted and prosecuted by Freemason officers, John Sutton survived to reveal the hard-hitting truth in this jaw-dropping memoir.

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo have pioneered the use of randomized control trials in development economics. Work based on these principles, supervised by the Poverty Action Lab, is being carried out in dozens of countries. Drawing on this and their 15 years of research from Chile to India, Kenya to Indonesia, they have identified wholly new aspects of the behavior of poor people, their needs, and the way that aid or financial investment can affect their lives. Their work defies certain presumptions: that microfinance is a cure-all, that schooling equals learning....

"Darkly humorous" is an understatement when it comes to this tale of addiction, homelessness, incarceration, and redemption. Jared Klickstein, the child of two heroin addicts who eventually became addicted himself, takes listeners on a raw and personal journey from his unsettling and secretive childhood in the suburbs to the slums of Skid Row. Through tales of violence, relapse, and deep inner struggle, Klickstein provides a harrowing account of his personal encounter with near-death.

His name was Antonio, but they would call him Nem. From the infamous favela of Rocinha in Rio, he was a hardworking young father forced to make a decision that would turn his world upside down. Nemesis is the story of an ordinary man who became the king of the largest slum in Rio, the head of a drug cartel and perhaps Brazil’s most wanted criminal. A man who tried to bring welfare and justice to a playground of gang culture and destitution while everyone around him drew guns and partied.

Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees "a fortune beyond counting" in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption.

Sixty percent of humanity - some four-point-three billion people - live in debilitating poverty. The standard development narrative suggests that alleviating poverty in poor countries is a matter of getting the internal policies right, combined with aid from rich countries. But anthropologist Jason Hickel argues that this approach misses the broader political forces at play. Global poverty - and the growing divide between "developing" and "developed" countries - has to do with how the global economy has been designed over the course of 500 years. Global inequality doesn't just exist; it has been created.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the government launched its ‘Everyone In’ programme, aiming to house the homeless through lockdown. The Prince Rupert, a four-star hotel in Shrewsbury with four poster beds and suits of armour, was asked to play their part and host 33 rough sleepers. This is the story of how the hotel owners and rough sleepers—many of whom had been out of housing for decades—spent months locked in together and wound up transforming each other’s lives.

From the impoverished districts of Paris to the streets of London, Orwell recounts his experiences on the bottom rung in some of Paris’ most famous kitchens, his time on the streets of London with a colourful cast of characters and offers biting social commentary on everything from accommodation and privilege to diet and language. Part memoir, part social commentary, Down and Out in Paris and London is a sobering analysis of poverty and society in two of the world’s wealthiest cities.

In prose that sparkles with humour and warmth, Yates charts the heartbreaks and joys of a life spent navigating the chaos of the housing system. She exposes the issues underpinning the crisis, from the state’s neglect of social housing to the rental rat race, and the disproportionate toll these take on the most marginalized in society. Drawing on interviews with tenants across the country and the stories behind our interiors, she explores the unexpected ways we can fight back.

On 14 June 2017, a 24-storey block of flats went up in flames. The fire climbed up cladding as flammable as solid petrol. Fire doors failed to self-close. No alarm rang out to warn sleeping residents. As smoke seeped into their homes, all were told to ‘stay put'. Many did–and they died. It was a disaster decades in the making. Peter Apps exposes how a steady stream of deregulation, corporate greed and institutional indifference caused this tragedy. It is the story of a grieving community forsaken by our government, a community still waiting for change.

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 measure of childhood trauma. Twenty years later, Kerry’s life is unrecognisable. She’s a prize-winning novelist who has travelled the world. She has a secure home, a loving partner and access to art, music, film and books..

Millennials are the first generation in Ireland to be worse off than their parents. Trapped in a game of rental roulette, stuck living at home as adults, and many on the brink of homelessness, the Irish housing crisis has defined the lives of an entire generation—and it is set to continue. With housing costs in Ireland the highest in the EU, the property ladder has been kicked from under thousands. So how did we get here…and how do we break the cycle?

A graphic and biting polemic that still holds a fierce political relevance and impact despite being written over half a century ago. First published in 1937 it charts George Orwell's observations of working-class life during the 1930s in the industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Lancashire. His depictions of social injustice and rising unemployment, the dangerous working conditions in the mines amid general squalor and hunger also bring together many of the ideas explored in his later works and novels.

From poverty and policing, homelessness and overrun prisons to Grenfell and hostile environments, Britain has long been failing those who need our help the most. There is arguably one unifying theme that links all these afflictions: proximity. Proximity is how close we are to the action and how that affects how we assess, relate to and address whatever that action happens to be. Almost every job requires a level of experience and training with the notable exception of the most powerful people in the country—our political class.

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 later, she watched Grenfell burn from a women’s refuge around the corner.

In 2016, a United Nations report found the UK government culpable for ‘grave and systematic violations’ of disabled people’s rights. Since then, driven by the Tory government’s obsessive drive to slash public spending whilst scapegoating the most disadvantaged in society, the situation for disabled people in Britain has continued to deteriorate. Punitive welfare regimes, the removal of essential support and services and an ideological regime that seeks to deny disability has resulted in a situation described by the UN as a ‘human catastrophe’.

London, 1857: Two teenage girls holding a sign that says "Fugitive Slaves" ask for money on the corner of Blackman Street. After a constable accosts them and charges them with begging, they end up in court, where newspapers pick up their story. Are the girls truly escaped slaves from Kentucky? Or will the city's dystopian Mendicity Society catch them in a lie, exposing them as born-and-raised Londoners and endangering their safety? With its many accounts of people like these who lived and made their living on the streets, Vagabonds forms a moving picture of London's most compelling period.