Skint Estate: A memoir of poverty, motherhood and survival

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Carraway shine a bright unflinching light on modern-day poverty in the UK - zero working hour contracts, social housing, benefits eligibility, food banks - all of it a far cry from the images regularly portrayed in the media.

The shed, 18ft by 6ft, marooned on its own at a crossroads, was once an ad hoc “office” for her dad, who had a rural surveyor’s practice that went bankrupt in 1992. As brilliant and merciless as Rain Dogs is at skewering poverty voyeurism (“I will not be your liberal victim of the week”), the same point is endlessly replayed until it loses its bite. Her “You’re only one Tory government away from an IRA comeback” sounds like an anarchist rant until you reflect that the present government is prepared to sacrifice peace in Northern Ireland on the altar of Brexit. Jambo is a 37-year-old man with “mental health” having a birthday pint in the pub and trying to fathom his impoverished life.

One slow week at work or another round of benefit sanctions is enough to send her straight back to the food bank. Det här är Ingenbarnsland av Hetekivi Olsson, i Storbritannien, ur en ensamstående kvinnas perspektiv.

Anger at these women being overlooked, abandoned when they are at their most vulnerable by a government that doesn’t care. In the end, malnourished from weeks of eating nothing but pasta and with her housing benefit stopped due to an administrative misjudgement, she is evicted from her flat. The reality of not having a fixed address and how that affects your ability to work, have a bank account, etc.It shows how people are left – in their hundreds of thousands – walking around with shattered souls. Human beings shouldn't have to be saints to be deserving of respect, and Carraway isn't going to pretend to be - not to fit a neat media-friendly image of a victim. She receives so much kindness from different people at different times (free pushchairs and breast pumps when she’s pregnant, etc), but she glosses over that, or she speaks with grim disdain of whoever handed it out.

The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.It isn’t a woeful tale of poverty porn, it’s a love story in the detritus between a mother and her daughter. Gabriel Gbadamosi’s Regeneration takes a more lyrical approach to the scars left by early horrors, dipping in and out of poetry, patois, prose and different periods of time, to no less powerful effect. Det är bara så naket och ärligt att jag gråter där jag går längs Mölndalsån, till mitt fasta jobb med bra lön, knäckebröds-låda och smör och ost i kylen. She describes how “credit checks” have become the modern equivalent of “no dogs, no blacks, no Irish”, designed to exclude certain groups – single mothers in particular – from getting a stable place. Not until Cash is actually dying via carefully planned suicide does she suddenly realise Biddy will find her body.