Down and Out in Paris and London (Penguin Modern Classics)

Down and Out in Paris and London is one of the great accounts of life in the underclass: of being hard-up and hungry, of sleeping in seedy hostels and working in squalid restaurants. George Orwell's first book published - when he was not yet thirty - is alive with the sights and smells of poverty. It is a revelatory memoir of surviving at the margins.