English Working Class

Many an incredible story may have been told about young courageous men and women cycling the globe in search of adventure, covering vast distances at speed each day with not a care in the world. Well, this story is a little different. It is a story about a 350-pound middle-aged, disabled, working-class husband and father. I was never a regular cyclist, and I knew nothing about bicycle maintenance and repair. Solo, self-financed, with no support network and without any fixed route plan other than, “I’m going that way.” What could go wrong? I wondered.

This is a new edition of Germinal, originally published in 1895 by Leonard Smithers for The Lutetian Society, of London, translated by Havelock Ellis. Part of Adeptio’s Unforgettable Classic Series, this is not a facsimile reprint. Obvious typographical errors have been carefully corrected and the entire text has been reset and redesigned by Adeptio Editions to enhance readability, while respecting the original edition. The eBook edition was designed in an elegant style and set to take full advantage of the readers' features. Germinal, a bleak but nevertheless fascinatingly realistic and ...

French Boy / A 1950s Franco-American Childhood is an insightful memoir of a young life both at the margins and at the center of the 1950s American experience. Born in 1947, Denis Ledoux had a mid-twentieth-century youth that almost seems to have been lived in another country and another century, but it is typical of what many Franco-Americans born in his generation experienced. French Boy explores much: the developmental stages of childhood; family dynamics, bilingualism, acculturation and assimilation, alienation and shame. Told by a third-generation Franco, this life story is set in the ...

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.

An eye-opening, topical, and moving memoir of one woman’s experience of working-class poverty in America. Born a fifth-generation Kansas wheat farmer on her paternal side and the product of generations of teenage mothers on her maternal side, Smarsh grew up in a family of labourers trapped in a cycle of poverty. She learned about hard work and also absorbed painful lessons about economic inequality, eventually coming to understand the powerful forces that have blighted the lives of poor and working-class Americans living in the heartland.

In a world where the working class struggles against the tide of unnatural inflation, this illuminating read unveils the power of bitcoin as nature's true currency. Journeying from Wall Street to the Himalayan mountains, Daniel exposes the sinister plot of the Keynesian Kings and explores how a simple, transparent, and energy-driven digital money can become a unifying force to build a better world for everyone. Through a fusion of personal narratives, expert analysis, and a call to action, this book inspires optimism about the future.

It's 1990 in London and Tom Hargreaves has it all: a burgeoning career as a reporter, fierce ambition and a brisk disregard for the "peasants" - ordinary people, his readers, easy tabloid fodder. His star looks set to rise when he stumbles across a scoop: a dead child on a London estate, grieving parents loved across the neighbourhood, and the finger of suspicion pointing at one reclusive family of Irish immigrants and "bad apples": the Greens.

What’s really more terrifying? A world where technology has set every rule – or the humans hellbent on breaking them? “My fake teeth are stained with coffee; now they look like everyone else’s teeth. I haven’t told Garry or anyone else about my synth bone skull. That’s a secret.” ______________ In the future, the Artificial Intelligence League has declared humans a safety hazard and banned them from manual labor. With unemployment rocketing, street gangs multiply, and crime runs rampant. Unskilled D citizens are the worst off. Forced into small and shoddy housing, and scraping...

Dr. Jessica Taylor grew up on a council estate where brutality and coercion were normalised, and where substance abuse was a day-to-day occurrence. Now one of the UK's most spirited advocates for women's rights, and a leading chartered psychologist helping women and girls subjected to violence and trauma, Jessica shares her own personal journey for the very first time.

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.

Dr John Cooper Clarke's dazzling, scabrous voice has reverberated through pop culture for decades, his influence on generations of performance poets and musicians plain for all to see. In WHAT, the original 'People's Poet' comes storming out of the gate with an uproarious new collection, reminding us why he is one of Britain's most beloved writers and performers. James Brown, John F. Kennedy, Jesus Christ: nobody is safe from the punk rocker's acerbic pen – and that's just the first poem.

In this passionate book, one of America’s leading progressive voices empowers those who wish for a fairer society. This Fight Is Our Fight lays out the many wrongs Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren seeks to right and builds on her meme, ‘Nevertheless, she persisted’, which spread across the world as a rallying cry for the millions who wish to fight back.

Inshallah United is the story of the first British-born son of a Pakistani family living in England’s second city. And geography is important, because if it wasn't for his mum and dad settling in Manchester rather than anywhere else in the world, so much of what makes up Nooruddean's identity could have been so different. As it was, he grew up as a Muslim, Manchester United supporting, Morrissey-loving, Maggie-hating, working-class Manc.

To everyone else, Terri White appeared to be living the dream, named one of Folio's Top Women in US Media and accruing further awards for the magazines she was editing. In reality, she was rapidly skidding towards a mental health crisis that would land her in a locked psychiatric ward as her past caught up with her. As well as growing up in a household in poverty, Terri endured sexual and physical abuse at the hands of a number of her mother's partners.

Growing up poor, Deborah Dundas knew what it meant to want, to be hungry, and to long for social and economic dignity; she understood the crushing weight of having nothing much expected of you. But even after overcoming many of the usual barriers faced by lower- and working-class people, she still felt anxious about her place, and even in relatively safe spaces reluctant to broach the subject of class. While new social movements have generated open conversation about gender and racism, discussions of class rarely include the voices of those most deeply affected: the working class and poor.

When Graham Caveney was in his early 20s, he began to suffer from what was eventually diagnosed as agoraphobia. What followed were decades of managing his condition and learning to live within the narrow limits it imposed on his life: no motorways, no dual carriageways, no shopping centres, limited time outdoors. Graham’s quest to understand his illness brought him back to his first love: books. From Harper Lee’s Boo Radley, Ford Madox Ford, Emily Dickinson and Shirley Jackson: the literary world is replete with examples of agoraphobics—once you go looking for them.

Christopher ‘Pip’ Fallow was born in the coal-miner’s cottage where his family of eight lived, in a village near Durham. Pip was destined to join his father and brothers down the pit, but the closure of his village’s mine in the 1980s saw him at the back of the dole queue like the rest. This is Pip’s story of being ‘dragged up proppa’, living by his wits, working and travelling the world before finally settling a few miles from where he grew up.

Chicken Liver Blues is an inimitable collection of twelve stories that at times barrels and swerves down rural backroads kicking up gravel and dust in its wake, and other moments it’s a calm late-night country cruise that soaks up the stars, the moon, and the heavens while contemplating the meaning of life. In TWENTY DOLLARS, a working-class man whose marriage is on the brink of unraveling is convinced to go out for another night of drinking, but this time his night out with the guys changes his life in more ways than one. BLUESMAN OF THE WOODS involves a young guitar rambler and his ...

In working-class Bay Ridge, Michael drives for a car service and gives lifts to his father, a former sanitation worker and current small-time bookie. He has a friend with a heroin habit, and a longtime girlfriend who expects they’ll get married one of these days. Michael spends most of his time on the familiar streets where he grew up, but now he’s crossing the bridge into Manhattan for some college classes—where he meets a seductive female classmate who seems to come from a whole different world.

Since the Great Recession, recent college grads have confronted an alarming reality: the economic engine that propelled earlier generations into the middle class has begun to stall out. Millions of workers with degrees face crushing debt while settling for jobs below their qualifications. The anger of this college-educated working class finally boiled over during the Covid pandemic, when workers at companies like Apple and Starbucks shocked corporate America by voting to unionize.