Showing results for "fiction" in Poverty & Homelessness

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.

Down and out in Paris and London is the first full-length work by the English author George Orwell, published in 1933. It is a memoir in two parts on the theme of poverty in the two cities. The first part is an account of living in near-destitution in Paris and the experience of casual labour in restaurant kitchens. The second part is a travelogue of life on the road in and around London from the tramp's perspective, with descriptions of the types of hostel accommodation available and some of the characters to be found living on the margins.

When the parish guardians send Lydia, daughter of convict James Knowles, to apprentice in the cotton mill at Caton, she is distraught at being parted from her younger siblings and mother, Betty, but she has no choice. At the mill, Lydia is bullied by some of the other girls and things do not go well when she stands up to the ringleader. Fearing she has killed someone and with the word murderess ringing in her ears, Lydia runs for her life.

A Child of the Jago is both thriller and condemnation of social conditions in the East End slums at the turn of the century. Boy hero Dicky Perrott is at heart full of humane instinct but his environment ensures his down fall. "It was my fate to encounter a place in Shoreditch where children were born and reared in circumstances which gave them no reasonable chance of living decent lives: where they were born fore-damned to a criminal or semi criminal career.

Der Kampf um bezahlbaren Wohnraum – Denglers zehnter Fall. Georg Dengler fühlt sich in Stuttgart so wohl wie schon lange nicht mehr, und auch mit Olga läuft es besser denn je. Trotz der aufziehenden Corona-Pandemie lässt er sich von ihr überreden, in Berlin zu ermitteln. Dort scheint ein Immobilienhau seine Mieter mit kriminellen Methoden rauszuekeln. Doch Dengler muss erkennen, dass die Sache größer ist, viel größer.

This grimly picturesque novel by Arthur Morrison was first published in 1897. The central character is Dicky Perrott, an urchin living in the Jago, an extremely squalid district of London's East End. The Jago is based on the Old Nichol slum, which lay at the back of Shoreditch High Street, and which has since been demolished. The novel describes Dicky's futile attempts to escape from the soul-destroying environment of the Jago, with the support of the Reverend Henry Sturt, who was based on the historical East End crusader, Arthur Osborne Jay, to whom the book is dedicated.

Mathieu vit dans la rue. Il l’a choisi. Ce n’est pas un aventurier, et ça n’a rien à voir avec la liberté. Est-ce qu’il s’autodétruit? Est-ce ainsi qu’il se préserve? Peu importe. Sa chienne Sam est là, qui l’aide à continuer. Mais quand elle disparaît, Mathieu doit mettre fin à son errance. Pour la retrouver, il entreprend un voyage dont les bifurcations le ramènent au secret de son passé.

London Labour and the London Poor is a rare and fascinating insight into the lives and struggles of the 19th-century poor. Written by journalist and reformer Henry Mayhew, a founder and editor of the satirical magazine Punch, it collects hundreds of testimonials from the lower strata of Victorian society. We encounter street entertainers, 'pure finders', cabinetmakers, gingerbread sellers, 'screeve-fakers', swindlers, and burglars. We hear accounts from toshers finding items in sewers, people attempting to train pigs to dance, and witness the sale of everything from gilt watches and chickweed to needles, dog collars, and eel soup.