She discusses areas of sex work that don’t usually get a lot of press: stripping, peep shows, telephone chat lines and a naked video app. She shares a detailed knowledge of household cleaners: semen stains on a dress must be attended to with a spray of Astonish Window and Glass. The smell of urine can be removed from the skin with vinegar. At times, these two first-time memoirists seem almost too self-consciously eloquent about their struggles to be thought of as representative. But their books nonetheless give powerful voice to the often silent story that explains so much of Britain’s current fracturing: the fact that half a generation can afford no settled place from which they can start to build a life. She sees almost too clearly to bear how circumscribed her life is, just as her father’s was before her. She says his first question to the doctor, after being diagnosed with cancer, was: “How long will I be able to work?” “I don’t think that’s a question you should have to ask,” says Tara, furiously, opening up the world of generational poverty with a line of dialogue. Working class single mothers are vilified in the media. Benefit scum, lazy, Jeremy Kyle fodder. The women who really anger the Daily Mail types. The type of women that the white middle aged men on faceless social media platforms like to say things like ‘they shouldn’t have kids if they can’t afford them’ and ‘they should be sterilised for wasting my tax payers money’ you know exactly who I’m talking about. They are the people that should read this book.

This is a regular occurrence in Costello’s life: men see her vulnerability as an opportunity to take sexual advantage of her. There is a lot of uninvited masturbation – and some invited; Costello is a sex worker, and one of her long-term clients and closest confidantes pays her to clean his flat while he touches himself. It may sound strange, but it’s a very sweet relationship. That Rain Dogs doesn’t treat Costello’s job as exotic or even sexy, instead just a regular way to make money, is refreshing. I'm a scrounger, a liar, a hypocrite, a stain on society with no basic morals - or so they say. After all, what else do you call a working-class single mum in temporary accommodation? Cash Carraway puts me in mind of Nelson Algren or Hubert Selby with their stories of degraded urban life, in this case with the vowels of Penge rather than New York. She is more overtly political than either of them, however, with an incisive invective. Similarly, Rain Dogs (already on HBO in the US) refuses to play out an anguished, one-dimensional treatise on class and poverty for audiences to sigh and weep over. After Costello and her daughter, Iris (a nuanced performance from newcomer Fleur Tashjian), are evicted from their flat, the aspiring writer and alcoholic (barely three months sober) scrabbles for work at a peep show, wrangles a room from a stranger by modelling a “nightie” (he says she has a “food bank body… lots of carbs”), breaks into a car, and more. And that’s just in the opener. Endlessly resourceful, Carraway works as a stripper in an upmarket West End club. When she falls pregnant, she switches to a job as a peep-show model — as one of her better-paid jobs, it allows her to save up three months’ rental deposit on a flat.From the creator of HBO and BBC's Rain Dogs, Skint Estate is the hard-hitting, blunt, dignified and brutally revealing debut memoir about impoverishment, loneliness and violence in austerity Britain - set against a grim landscape of sink estates, police cells, refuges and peepshows - skilfully woven into a manifesto for change. I finished this in one day. Cash has a brash, sometimes aggressive writing style that is both compelling and jarring to read. She can certainly get her point across, and it’s an important one at that. She talks of a violent childhood, leading to a violent adulthood and pregnancy. Alone, scared - but excited to finally have somebody to love, and be loved in return. She talks about being ignored and stigmatised throughout her time as a single mother - people just don’t listen to women like her. I knew going in this would be dark at times, bleak and depressing, but I wasn’t expecting it to raise so much anger in me. Anger at these women being overlooked, abandoned when they are at their most vulnerable by a government that doesn’t care. The shame and despair, relying on zero hour jobs and food banks to survive. Living below the poverty line, stealing sanitary towels because you can’t afford them, and thinking of suicide as your only escape from this life. At times it was devastatingly heartbreaking. TW: domestic abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, explicit language and discussions of sexual content

Inspired by Skint Estate, the drama is described as “a wild and punky tale of being trapped below the poverty line and doing everything it takes to escape.” Though their voices are very different, in some ways each woman’s journey to writing her book – their hoped-for route out of the situations they describe – is comparable. Both had challenging teenage years; both went to university; both took too many drugs and had disastrous relationships; both imagined they lived in a country with adequate safety nets for those prepared to work, and discovered in the decade of austerity and the benefits cap that they did not. One crucial fact, in the context of each, is precisely the same, however. In the 20-odd years since they came of age, average house prices in Britain have risen seven times faster than average wages. Along with millions of others, they are the casualties of that economic fact. Davies creates a life in which she “still feels skint but no longer poor” There isn’t anything she does not want to share from “my tragic and dirty little life” from her vagina size (small) to her suicide (unsuccessful). Mainly, however, this book is about the crippling cost of living in London under the minimum wage, doing fragmentary bits of jobs she can fit in with childcare. As she says: “Everyone has their price. It’s not always monetary. Mine is though. 20 quid.”

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People who are able bodied or well enough to work. Those that work but get top ups from Universal credit. Cash Carraway's unique voice, filled in equal measure with rage and inspiration, tells a story of hope amongst state violence. Brilliant and compelling. Anna Minton Rain Dogs, the BBC’s new comedy drama from Skint Estate author Cash Carraway is many things: dark, hilarious, crushing, filthy, engrossing, powerful. But it is not, categorically, poverty porn. It would be an easy trap for the series, which follows Costello and Iris from house to house as they try to make each a home, to fall into. But Carraway’s own experience of living on the breadline, and a steadfast avoidance of romanticising the actualities of homelessness, keep the series firmly in reality. This takes you from women’s refuges and police cells to peep shows and strip clubs. Where bankruptcy, temporary accommodation, food banks and period poverty are regular occurrences. This book shows you how our current benefit system is not working. How the government is cleansing London if it’s working class and people are turning a blind eye.

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. Gary Beadle plays Gary, simmering with impotent rage, piecing together the fragments of memory and hoping that the one piece of advice his mother left him will be enough to protect him from the uncaring, indifferent powers that be this time round. Cash reminds herself of the important things; love for her daughter; community and friendship; and through this, Britain (government) need to change to protect those vulnerable in society and give them a “leg up”. On the beat … police officer Adam Naismith with police dog Wolf. Photograph: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan/Firecrest Films/BBC 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. She has to accept what she has always resisted: being moved out of her beloved London. She has finally been “socially cleansed”: placed in homeless housing in Kent, a place she despises for its racism. Daisy May Cooper plays a young working class single mum living with her ten year old daughter in the brutal lonely landscape of austerity Britain.Visst kan man diskutera lämpligheten i att bo kvar i en stad London eller skaffa barn när man lever på marginalerna, men det är att flytta fokus från problemet. We shouldn’t just need to be on the brink of something to just survive. We should be enjoying life.

She is angry about politicians sneering at the poor while owning the properties whose rents keep them in destitution; she is angry about “poverty porn” TV programmes that relish making an entertainment of the “economic gang rape that makes the poor and vulnerable the scapegoat for society’s decline”. As a television project, it is heartening. The monologues are written and directed by people with direct personal experience of poverty. (For example, the novelist Kerry Hudson, the author of Lowborn, a clear-eyed memoir of her deprived childhood, is the writer of Hannah’s tale of homelessness.) The series’ rubric was to cast and commission as many new faces as possible, creating those all-important first footholds and credits. Cash is *determined* to tell her woeful story of poverty and deprivation even if the facts don’t seem to tally with it. Why let such boring details get in the way of a ripping yarn? And she’s determined to make it the government’s fault, and to blame All Men (except scruffy ones who don’t wear suits and make art, those men are allowed a small pass). Plus, she thinks no one can possibly have problems or sadness if they’re not on the breadline. How boring, how cliched, how...utterly infuriating.Writer Cash Carraway’s own experience of life on the breadline, and her avoidance of romanticising homelessness, keep the series firmly in reality (Photo: Simon Ridgway/Sid Gentle Films/HBO) This is the memoir of a woman who is not a stain on society. She’s not a shameful secret, stealing money from the government. She’s not lazy, or greedy. She’s a single mother, raising a child in a city she loves, with no support network and a history of domestic abuse. Cash Carraway is just one voice in millions that we never hear. Forgotten and ignored. This is her story, her life - but unfortunately it’s far from unique. Carraway gives her struggle a practised edge of bleak ironies. Her book has developed, in part, from a fictional one-woman spoken word show, “ Refuge Woman”, which she has toured in collaboration with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and Battersea Arts Centre. These origins give it a tendency to search for a killer one-liner, or dramatic extreme, when the story can stand well enough on its own. Her life is, she writes, “an invite to Daily Mail comments screaming: Where’s the dad??” She is one of “2 million demonised single women in the UK banished from the sisterhood… because we can’t afford to cook Deliciou sly Ella… and don’t have Farrow & Ball No 26 Down Pipe on their living room walls”. While some episodes are better than others, it is a uniformly strong lineup: never dull, always vivid and never descending into mere agitprop. They all feel like real glimpses into real lives, providing windows on to realities that are too infrequently (and inaccurately) depicted in drama. The underprivileged and disfranchised appear often in documentaries, of course, but rarely escape a framing as zoological specimens.