Working Class

When Ishmael takes a crew of academy cadets into the Toe Holds, he's unprepared for the level of trouble green hands can get into. Meanwhile, their academy liaison discovers what can go wrong when you learn the wrong lessons and try to teach the wrong students. Will they all make it back to the academy before somebody accidentally takes a short walk out the airlock without a suit?

Rob Beckett never seems to fit in. At work, in the middle-class world of television and comedy, he’s the laddie, cockney geezer, but to his mates down the pub in south-east London, he’s the theatrical one, a media luvvie. Even at home, his wife and kids are posher than him. In this hilarious exploration of class, Rob compares his life growing up as a working-class kid to the life he lives now, trying to understand where he truly belongs.

No Worries if Not is a funny, relatable coming-of-age story, that explores Soph Galustian's experiences of poverty, queerness, mental health, grief and community. She recounts her life from childhood, to teens, into adulthood through a mixture of short stories, spoken word, illustrations, and space for the listener to reflect (or draw tits...whatever you prefer).

This remarkable account has had an enduring influence on social and economic studies and has remained in print since its first English publication in 1885. It was written, in German, by a youthful Friedrich Engels, the son of a German industrialist, who was already concerned - even angered - by the conditions he saw inflicted on the working classes as the Industrial Revolution gathered momentum. His first visit to England (1842-44) and what he saw there with his own eyes fuelled his concerns and prompted him to make this formal study.

It’s a life too big and a story too extraordinary for just one book. Jimmy Barnes has lived many lives - from Glaswegian migrant kid to iconic front man, from solo superstar to proud father of his own musical clan. In this hugely anticipated sequel to his critically acclaimed best seller, Working Class Boy, Jimmy picks up the story of his life as he leaves Adelaide in the back of an old truck with a then unknown band called Cold Chisel. A spellbinding and searingly honest reflection on success, fame and addiction, this self-penned memoir reveals how Jimmy Barnes used the fuel of childhood trauma to ignite and propel Australia’s greatest rock ’n’ roll story.

In this acclaimed investigation, Owen Jones explores how the working class has gone from 'salt of the earth' to 'scum of the earth.' Exposing the ignorance and prejudice at the heart of the chav caricature, he portrays a far more complex reality. The chav stereotype, he argues, is used by governments as a convenient fig leaf to avoid genuine engagement with social and economic problems and to justify widening inequality.

In Second Class, working-class Americans of all races, political orientations, and occupations share their stories—cleaning ladies, health care aides, cops, truck drivers, fast food workers, electricians, and more. In their own words, these working-class Americans explain the struggles and triumphs of their increasingly precarious lives—as well as what policies they think would improve them.

Written entirely in East Coast Scots, A Working Class State of Mind, the debut book by Colin Burnett, brings the everyday reality and language of life in Scotland to the surface. Colin's fiction takes themes in the social sciences and animates them in vivid ethnographic portrayals of what it means to be working-class in Scotland today. Delving into the tragic exploits of Aldo, as well as his long-suffering best friends Dougie and Craig, the book follows these and other characters as they make their way in a city more divided along class lines than ever before.

In this satirical faux autobiography, Moll Flanders, abandoned at birth, sets her rebellious heart on a life of independence in late 17th-century England. A strong-willed woman, she is determined to make a better life for herself, no matter what it takes: thievery, prostitution, seductions, marriages, or illicit liaisons. Born to a convicted felon in Newgate prison Moll learns to live off her wits, refusing to be a helpless victim and defying most traditional depictions of women of the era.

Around the world, populist movements are gaining traction among the white working class. Meanwhile, members of the professional elite - journalists, managers, and establishment politicians - are on the outside looking in, left to argue over the reasons. Williams explains that many people have conflated "working class" with "poor" - but the working class is, in fact, the elusive, purportedly disappearing middle class. They often resent the poor and the professionals alike. But they don't resent the truly rich.

Raw, gritty, compassionate, surprising and darkly funny - Australian legend Jimmy Barnes' unforgettable childhood memoir. A household name, an Australian rock icon, the elder statesman of OzPubRock - there isn't an accolade or cliché that doesn't apply to Jimmy Barnes. But long before Cold Chisel and Barnesy, long before the tall tales of success and excess, there was the true story of James Dixon Swan - a working class boy whose family made the journey from Scotland to Australia in search of a better life.

In 21st century Britain, what does it mean to be working class? This book asks 24 working class writers to examine the issue as it relates to them. Examining representation, literature, sexuality, gender, art, employment, poverty, childhood, culture and politics, this book is a broad and firsthand account of what it means to be drawn from the bottom of Britain's archaic but persistent class structure.

Mark Hodkinson grew up among the terrace houses of Rochdale in a house with just one book. His dad kept it on top of a wardrobe with other items of great worth - wedding photographs and Mark's National Cycling Proficiency certificate. If Mark wanted to read it, he was warned not to crease the pages or slam shut the covers. Today, Mark is an author, journalist and publisher. He still lives in Rochdale but is now snugly ensconced (or is that buried?) in a 'book cave' surrounded by 3,500 titles - at the last count.

John Lennon called himself a working class hero. George Harrison was a working class mystic. Born in Liverpool as the son of a bus conductor and a shop assistant, for the first six years of his life he lived in a house with no indoor bathroom. This book gives an honest, in-depth view of his personal journey from his blue-collar childhood to his role as a world-famous spiritual icon.

Juno Roche was born into a working-class family in London in the '60s, who dabbled in minor criminality. For their father, violence and love lived together; for their mother, addiction was the only way to survive. School was a respite, but shortly after beginning their university course, Juno was diagnosed with HIV, then a death sentence. Juno is a survivor; they outlived their diagnosis, got a degree and became an artist. But however hard you try to take the kid out of the family, some scars go too deep.

Starting with Rebecca Smith’s own family history – foresters in Cumbria, miners in Derbyshire, millworkers in Nottinghamshire, builders of reservoirs and the Manchester Ship Canal – Rural is an exploration of our green and pleasant land, and the people whose labour has shaped it. Beautifully observed, these are the stories of professions and communities that often go overlooked. Smith shows the precarity for those whose lives are entangled in the natural landscape. And she traces how these rural working-class worlds have changed.

Gewinner und Verlierer im Ungleichland – eine schonungslose Analyse der sozialen Ungerechtigkeit in Deutschland... Journalistin und Autorin Julia Friedrichs hinterfragt mit ihrem beeindruckenden und aufrüttelnden Sachbuch "Working Class: Warum wir Arbeit brauchen, von der wir leben können" die Wohlstandsillusion. In Zeiten der prekären Arbeitsverhältnisse und des Lohndumpings ist der Vermögensaufbau aus eigener Kraft für die meisten Bundesbürger unmöglich.

Christophe Guilluy, a French geographer, makes the case that France has become an "American society" - one that is both increasingly multicultural and increasingly unequal. The divide between the global economy's winners and losers in today's France has replaced the old left-right split, leaving many on "the periphery".

1979. Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston. But they soon learn that the welcome in America will be far from warm. Trelawny, their youngest son, comes of age in a society which regards him with suspicion and confusion, greeting him with the puzzled question ‘What are you?’ Their eldest son Delano’s longing for a better future for his own children is equalled only by his recklessness in trying to secure it.

Drawing from careful examinations of their personal narratives, Jamie L. Bronstein investigates the ways in which working people thought about the good life as seen through their experiences with family and friends, rewarding work, interaction with the natural world, science and creativity, political causes and religious commitments, and physical and economic struggles. Informed by the history of emotions and the philosophical and social-scientific literature on happiness, this book reflects broadly on the industrial-era working-class experience in an era of immense social and economic change.