Showing titles in Poverty & Homelessness

‘An incredible read. I laughed, I cried and my heart was truly touched by this beautifully written true story of hope and humanity at its best.’ Rosemary Conley CBE 'An extraordinary story. Truly Inspirational' Tim Vine An astonishing story of kindness, self-learning, pain, unbelievable hope...

Brought to you by Penguin. 'We love a rags-to-riches story, and we love to see someone triumph through sheer determination. But the story is rarely that simple. My story isn't, anyway.' As the middle of five kids growing up in dire poverty, the odds were low on Katriona O'Sullivan making...

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.

The book that has been waiting to be written – how Ireland’s housing policy has locked an entire generation out of the housing market and what we should do about it. Millennials are the first generation in Ireland to be worse off than their parents. Trapped in a game of rental roulette...

In London, only those with vast cash deposits can get on the property ladder, private rents have spiralled out of control and the wait for social housing is measured in decades. Once vibrant communities are being uprooted, schools are closing down and homelessness is rampant. It was not always like this. Tracing the last forty years of housing policy, Peter Apps examines this transformation, following a diverse group of Londoners as their fortunes rise and fall across the decades amid the economic forces sweeping through the city.

Justice today often disguises punishment as fairness, yet leaves both victims and offenders trapped in cycles of pain. This book argues for a radical rethinking: true justice is not about retribution, but about understanding why crimes happen and preventing them from happening again. Through philosophical reflection, psychological insight, and critical analysis of modern courts and prisons, Boris Kriger exposes the failures of the current system and sketch the contours of a new one—justice that heals instead of harms, supports instead of condemns, and restores trust by restoring people.

Poverty is much more than simply a lack of material resources, and it takes much more than donations and handouts to solve it. When Helping Hurts shows how some alleviation efforts, failing to consider the complexities of poverty, have actually (and unintentionally) done more harm than good. But it looks ahead. It encourages us to see the dignity in everyone, to empower the materially poor, and to know that we are all uniquely needy - and that God in the gospel is reconciling all things to himself.

Nick and Pascal live and sleep outside in central London. They are an unusual duo: Nick is an avid reader of history and philosophy able to converse on any topic; Pascal is quiet, spending much of his time lying still, communicating silently with birds and animals. They have lived alongside each other in London's streets for nearly two decades, yet do not identify as homeless. For the past five years they have taken shelter under the hornbeam trees in Regent's Park. Emma Tarlo first meets Nick and Pascal when out walking. Gradually they develop a friendship.

Anti-Social is the diary of a council worker whose job is to keep his community happy, or at least away from each other’s throats. That’s hard enough at the best of times but when government cuts mean that hospitals, social services and police are all at breaking point, the possibility of complete chaos is never far away. This is an urgent, timely but, most of all, hysterically funny true story of a life spent working with the people society wants to forget and the problems that nobody else can resolve.

Sixty percent of humanity - some four-point-three billion people - live in debilitating poverty. The standard development narrative suggests that alleviating poverty in poor countries is a matter of getting the internal policies right, combined with aid from rich countries. But anthropologist Jason Hickel argues that this approach misses the broader political forces at play. Global poverty - and the growing divide between "developing" and "developed" countries - has to do with how the global economy has been designed over the course of 500 years. Global inequality doesn't just exist; it has been created.

In the span of a generation, oil-rich Venezuela spiraled into a dire state of economic collapse. Reporter Paula Ramón experienced the crisis firsthand as her middle-class family saw their quality of life deteriorate. Public services no longer functioned. Money lost its value. Her mother couldn’t afford to buy food, which was increasingly scarce. The once-prosperous country fell into ruin. Like many others, Ramón’s family struggled to survive each day in their beloved city, Maracaibo—until, one by one, they each made the unbearable choice to leave the home they love.

Jamie Mustard was born into one of the most influential fringe movements in the 1970s: Scientology. Raised on a mythos of spaceships and made to believe that it was his life’s purpose to help save the world, he was determined to survive—not only unsurvivable neglect but also the impossible physical and psychological gauntlet of extreme poverty and illiteracy. Child X is a dark existential journey into a deepest hole of human existence and the road back.

A warmly funny, intensely moving and startlingly personal account of the lives of an urban parish priest and his parishioners. Father Alex Frost was not always a man of the cloth. He found his calling while running an Argos store in his native Burnley, moonlighting as a stand-up comedian and...

As we recover through the reality of a global pandemic, we face into a severe cost of living crisis. We live in a time of great uncertainty. More people are being pushed into poverty. The gap between the richest and poorest is growing wider. We are, perhaps, more divided than we have ever been. Our public services are overwhelmed. Citizens are fed up.Our society is sick. What can we do? We must allow ourselves to feel the pain of our reality, be outraged, challenge the inevitability of the status quo and create moral alternative economies of a reimagined future.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER ONE OF TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY A KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE CENTURY AN OPRAH DAILY BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE PAST...

The crime-infested intersection of West Fayette and Monroe Streets is well-known--and cautiously avoided--by most of Baltimore. But this notorious corner's 24-hour open-air drug market provides the economic fuel for a dying neighborhood. David Simon, an award-winning author and crime reporter...

Read by the author, Dragged Up Proppa is the story of growing up working class in a forgotten England. 'Very compelling, beautifully written memoir of a time and England that no longer exists but remains just as important today as ever' – Sebastian Payne, author of Broken Heartlands Pip Fallow...

Born into the slums of Glasgow in the late '70s, a 4-year-old John's life is filled with the debris of alcoholism and poverty. Soon after witnessing a drowning, his mother's addictions take over their lives, leaving him starving in their flat, awaiting her return. A concerned neighbor reports her, and he is forcibly taken away from his mother and placed into the care system. There, he dreams of being reunited with her.

While Jodey Whiting was stuck in hospital battling pneumonia over Christmas, a letter dropped on her doormat from the Department of Work and Pensions, asking her to attend an assessment. Despite her health problems, the powers-that-be callously halted benefit payments for the mum-of-nine. With no money coming in, Jodey killed herself, aged just 42. Another DWP letter pronouncing her "fit to work" was sent to her home three days after her tragic death. A Mother's Job is the story of how Jodey's mum Joy Dove, 67, took on the system—and won justice for her daughter.

London, 1857: Two teenage girls holding a sign that says "Fugitive Slaves" ask for money on the corner of Blackman Street. After a constable accosts them and charges them with begging, they end up in court, where newspapers pick up their story. Are the girls truly escaped slaves from Kentucky? Or will the city's dystopian Mendicity Society catch them in a lie, exposing them as born-and-raised Londoners and endangering their safety? With its many accounts of people like these who lived and made their living on the streets, Vagabonds forms a moving picture of London's most compelling period.