Since The Quiet Fleet came out I have been asked for a reading list about work roughly once a month, and I have been sending the same four books, so they may as well live here.
The list is short on purpose. There are hundreds of books about jobs and very few about work, by which I mean what it does to the hours and to the people in the house.
The four
One oral history of a closed industry, one novel written from inside a wage, one book of essays by somebody who did the work before they wrote about it, and one long poem that has no business being on a list like this and earns its place anyway.
I am deliberately not naming them here. Come to a reading and ask me and I will write them on the back of your ticket, which is a better system than a blog post and keeps the readings interesting.
If you want the honest version: the best book about work I have read in ten years was a set of harbour office ledgers from 1978, and nobody published it.