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.

'I pictured myself a wine-dark streak in a TV desert, ears too full of the summer wind to hear that ominous ticking in the sky: the sound of a cultural clock counting me out of youth.' Briohny Doyle turned 30 without a clear idea of what her adult life should look like. The world she lived in, with its global economic uncertainty, political conservatism and precarious employment conditions, didn't match the one her parents grew up in.

Darren McGarvey has experienced poverty and its devastating effects firsthand. He knows why people from deprived communities all around Britain feel angry and unheard. And he wants to explain...So he invites you to come on a safari of sorts. But not the kind where the wildlife is surveyed from a safe distance. This audiobook takes you inside the experience of poverty to show how the pressures really feel and how hard their legacy is to overcome. 

Delivered in Stockholm on 7 December 2017, 'My Twentieth Century Evening and Other Small Breakthroughs' is the lecture of the Nobel Laureate in Literature, Kazuo Ishiguro. A generous and hugely insightful biographical sketch, it explores his relationship with his homeland of Japan, reflections on his own novels and an insight into some of his inspirations from the worlds of writing, music and film.

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..

Billy Hopkins is thrilled to be released from the trials and tribulations of teaching when he takes early retirement. He's just buzzing with ideas for filling his time and making a spare buck - whether it's investing in apparently fail-safe business enterprises, starting up himself as an entrepreneur specialising in doll's houses or writing up the story of his life.

A mother who invented her past, a father who was often absent, a son who wondered if this could really be his family...Richard Glover's favourite dinner-party game is called 'Who's Got the Weirdest Parents?' It's a game he always thinks he'll win. There was his mother, a deluded snob who made up large swathes of her past and who ran away with Richard's English teacher, a Tolkien devotee, nudist and stuffed toy collector.

Jonathan Dean's great-grandfather, David Schapira, lived a life of epic achievement and epic suffering. Forced to flee Ukraine at the outbreak of World War I, he was blinded fighting for his adopted country then survived - just - the concentration camp that country later sent him to. In between he found love and laughter in Vienna and became the first Austrian lawyer to train using braille - something no Briton would do until the new century dawned. Dean's grandfather, Heinz Schapira, was also a refugee.

This is a true story of living and learning - being confused and comforted - with the excluded Ashkali people of Kosovo; an account of the challenges and delights of what happens when you find your community but it's a long way from home.

You learn a few useful things at school - the three Rs come in handy, and it's good to know how to perform under pressure and wait your turn - but most of what matters, what makes you into a functioning human being, able to hold your own in conversation, find your path, know what to avoid in relationships and secure a meaningful job, no teacher will ever tell you. This diamond-sharp, gut-punchingly honest book of hard-earned wisdom is one mother's effort to equip her daughter for survival in the real world.

Loneliness has reached the levels of an epidemic. From the bullied child to the new parent, from the pensioner who has outlived friends and family members to teenagers who manage their social lives through the glow of a mobile phone, it can - and does - affect anyone and everyone, irrespective of age, race or class. Many suffer in silence, convinced it's a confession too far, a sign of too much vulnerability, a shameful failing. But the human condition is not a failing. What's it like when loneliness descends? How does it announce itself, and how do you recognise it?

Social mobility is not a train you get to board after you've scraped together enough for the ticket. You have to build the whole bloody engine, with nothing but a spoon and hand-me-down psychological distress. Violence, treachery and cruelty run through the generational veins of Rick Morton's family. A horrific accident thrusts his mother and siblings into a world impossible for them to navigate, a life of poverty and drug addiction. 

David Mitchell, who you may know for his inappropriate anger on every TV panel show except Never Mind the Buzzcocks, his look of permanent discomfort on C4 sex comedy Peep Show, his online commenter-baiting in The Observer or just for wearing a stick-on moustache in That Mitchell and Webb Look, has written a book about his life. 

Johnny is 19. He likes music, art and going to the beach. He is also autistic - in his case that means he will probably never get a job, never have a girlfriend, never leave home. And over the last 19 years this is what his father, TV producer and comedy writer Henry Normal and his wife Angela have been trying to come to terms with. This is a book for anyone whose life has been touched by autism - it's about the hope, the despair, and the messy, honest sometimes comical day-to-day world of autism, as well as a wonderful, warm book about the unconditional, unconventional love between a father, a mother and a son.

When she was suddenly given the opportunity of a new life in rural Jutland, journalist and archetypal Londoner Helen Russell discovered a startling statistic: the happiest place on earth isn't Disneyland but Denmark, a land often thought of by foreigners as consisting entirely of long, dark winters, cured herring, Lego and pastries. What is the secret to their success? Are happy Danes born or made?