English Working Class

Bloomsbury presents Notes from a Working-Class Playwright, written and read by Leo Butler Award-winning British playwright, Leo Butler looks back over 25 of writing for the stage and his extensive experience teaching and mentoring emerging playwrights through the Royal Court Young Writers'...

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?

Prisoners of the American Dream is Mike Davis's brilliant exegesis of a persistent and major analytical problem for Marxist historians and political economists: Why has the world's most industrially advanced nation never spawned a mass party of the working class?

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.

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.

Pre-order QUEENIE IS WORKING ON IT, the brand new book from Candice Carty-Williams, now NOW WITH EXCLUSIVE QUEENIE IS WORKING ON IT EXTRACT! THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER BOOK OF THE YEAR AT THE BRITISH BOOK AWARDS SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA FIRST NOVEL AWARD LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR...

Love and the Working Class is a unique look at the emotions of hard-living, nineteenth-century Americans who were often on the cusp of literacy. These laboring folk highly valued letters and, however difficult it was, wrote to stay connected to those they loved. This book displays the personal expression of factory hands, manual laborers, peddlers, coopers, carpenters, lumbermen, miners, tanners, haulers, tailors, seamstresses, laundresses, domestics, sharecroppers, independent farmers, and common soldiers and their wives.

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.

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.

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.

Brought to you by Penguin. Unleash the dark and delirious with this electrifying anthology of folk horror from some of Britain's most iconic working-class voices A phonograph cylinder that plays on a loop for eternity, casting out ghostly spectres of violence; a centuries-old stew made of...

Friedrich Engels spent two years (from 1842 to 1844) in Manchester, England, working at his father's factory. During that period he observed and recorded the effect of the industrial revolution on the labor market and the subsequent condition of what became the working class of England.

‘Pacy, witty and affectionate’ Guardian 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...

Manchester, 1936 Fascism looms in Europe, and Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts are on the rise. Meanwhile, aspiring artist Rose is drawn to an unlikely stranger, unaware her future is about to be caught up in the growing storm. Facing straitened circumstances, following the death of their clergyman...

Including a preface read by the author, Joel Budd. Underdogs is a compelling, myth-busting account of white working-class Britain. 'Few books bring so much fresh thinking to tired arguments' - Robert Ford, author of Brexitland ________ No large group of people in Britain is as badly...

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.

Over the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, as many as eight million whites left the economically depressed southern countryside and migrated to the booming factory towns and cities of the industrial Midwest in search of work. The "hillbilly highway" was one of the largest internal relocations of poor and working people in American history, yet it has largely escaped close study by historians. 

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR NATURE WRITING 2024 ‘Eye-opening and persuasive’ SUNDAY TIMES ‘Brilliant … I loved it’ KIT DE WAAL ‘Thoughtful, moving, honest’ CAL FLYN *Winner of The Lakeland Book of the Year 2024* Work in the countryside ties you, soul and salary, to the...

Tales of adventure, misadventure, love and loss - this collection of non-fiction short stories from the Australian rock legend turned writer is vintage Jimmy. Outrageous, witty, warm and wise, Killing Time shares more than forty yarns reflecting an epic life - from an encounter with a soul...