Alone, pregnant and living in a women's refuge, Cash Carraway couldn't vote in the 2010 general election that ushered austerity into Britain. Her voice had been silenced. Years later, she watched Grenfell burn from a women's refuge around the corner. What had changed? The vulnerable were still at the bottom of the heap, unheard. Without a stable home, without a steady income, without family support - how do you survive? Most are given jobs on the minimum wage which offers no add on top ups, rent goes up, utility bills increase and the public spendature is cut. The darkly funny debut memoir from the creator of HBO and BBC's Rain Dogs, Skint Estate is a scream against austerity that rises full of rage in a landscape of sink estates, police cells, refuges and peepshows. Daisy May Cooper (This Country) is to star in the show, which is provisionally titled Cash Carraway.

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. This book is just something else. It is a book that should be read by everyone. Most importantly by the people who wouldn’t read it. It can not be described as enjoyable. It is a difficult subject matter that is told with gritty truth, anger and a splash of the narrator’s dry humour. But it is powerful. It is a call to arms.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. She is also very funny. “Lots of things about living in a woman’s refuge make me laugh,” she says, which is not the most common response. She isn’t above selling stories about her wretched daily grind of budgeting to a trashy supermarket magazine. Even they found her piece about period poverty to be too strong to print, though at least they paid her for it.

She doesn’t even have empathy with her own daughter Biddy. Not until Cash is actually dying via carefully planned suicide does she suddenly realise Biddy will find her body. We’re expected to believe she left this bit out of her plan - even though she made sure that she and Biddy partied beforehand (in one of the chain restaurants she derides and yet, despite being a proud Londoner with a plethora of options, ALWAYS chooses). Interesting.Cash Carraway is a single mum living in temporary accommodation. She’s been moved around the system since she left home at sixteen. She’s also been called a stain on society. And she’s caught in a poverty trap. 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

Thank you very much to Netgalley and Penguin Random House for allowing me to read an eARC copy of Skint Estate. The main positive I took is the absolute love Cash so clearly has for her daughter. Together they are a formidable team and have bonded in a way that only their shared life experiences could bring. Also, the chapter surrounding the dilapidated women’s refuge and subsequent (if brief) unification of the women, and their solidarity to bring about change showed a small glimmer of hope on an otherwise desolate landscape. These women need a voice, they need an opportunity to voice it, and I applaud Penguin for giving Cash the stage to do it on. TW: domestic abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, explicit language and discussions of sexual content 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.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. Det är en högst politisk text: hur dyrt det är att vara fattig, att ses som en belastning för samhället, hur det konservativa partiet (tory) drar in på sociala skyddsnät för ensamstående mammor (”de får skylla sig själva”, ”skaffa inte barn om du inte har råd”), när skyddshemmet för utsatta kvinnor kollapsar (taket ramlar in) och det tar 8 timmar för någon slags personal att komma, problemet när hyresrätter (som uppfördes för socialt utsatta personer) privatiseras och får marknadshyror. Hur omöjligt det är att hosta upp 6 månaders förskottshyra i deposition, att jobba för 1 pund i timmen, att bara kunna jobba när barnet är i skolan (eftersom barnomsorg är så dyrt att bara medelklassen har råd) och vilka slags jobb som finns kvar. Hur nästan omöjligt det är att ta sig ur situationen. Hur kvinnor alltid är offren. I’m just finishing reading J. Bowyer Bell’s The Secret Army, a history of the IRA 1916 – 1979. What is staggering is how factionalised, incompetent or corrupt, in the “shadow of the gangster gunman” or with the “taint of Communism”, it has been for much of its existence.