Longlisted for the Orwell Prize, 2019 ____________ The Times Round-up of the Best Non-fiction Paperbacks, 2019 The Times Best Current Affairs and Big Ideas Book of the Year, 2018 For many in modern Britain, careers are low-paid and high-risk, a series of short-term jobs with no security and little future. In this essential expose, James Bloodworth goes undercover to investigate how working life has become a waking nightmare. From the Orwellian reach of an Amazon warehouse to the trials of a care worker, Hired is a clear-eyed analysis of a divided nation and a riveting dispatch from the very frontline of low-wage Britain. 'An extraordinary and unsettling journey into the way modern Britons work. It is George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London for the gig-economy age' MATTHEW D'ANCONA, author of Post-Truth

The best jobs in Britain today are overwhelmingly done by the children of the wealthy. Meanwhile, it is increasingly difficult for bright but poor kids to transcend their circumstances. This state of affairs should not only worry the less well-off. It hurts the middle classes too, who are increasingly locked out of the top professions by those from affluent backgrounds.Hitherto, Labour and Conservative politicians alike have sought to deal with the problem by promoting the idea of 'equality of opportunity'. In politics, social mobility is the only game in town, and old socialist arguments emphasising economic equality are about as fashionable today as mullets and shell suits. Yet genuine equality of opportunity is impossible alongside levels of inequality last seen during the 1930s. In a grossly unequal society, the privileges of the parents unfailingly become the privileges of the children.A vague commitment from our politicians to build a 'meritocracy' is not enough. Nor is it desirable: a perfectly stratified meritocracy, in which everyone knew their station based on 'merit', would be a deeply unpleasant place to live.Any genuine attempt to improve social mobility must start by reducing the gap between rich and poor.

Rarely has there seemed a more confusing time to be a man. This uncertainty has spawned an array of bizarre and harmful underground subcultures, collectively known as the ‘manosphere’, as men search for new forms of belonging.

In Lost Boys, acclaimed journalist James Bloodworth delves into these worlds and asks: what does their emergence say about Western society? Why are so many men susceptible to the sinister beliefs these groups promote? And what can we do about their pernicious encroachment upon our social and political spheres? Along the way, he enlists in a bootcamp for ‘alpha males’, dissects cultural figures including Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate, and accompanies modern day Hugh Hefners as they broadcast their jet-set lifestyles to millions of followers.

Combining compulsive memoir with powerful reporting, Lost Boys is an essential guide to the contradictions in contemporary masculinity.