Down and Out in Paris and London

"You have talked so often of going to the dogs - and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them."

George Orwell’s vivid memoir of his time among the desperately poor and destitute in 'Down and Out in Paris and London' is a moving tour of the underworld of society.

Although his account is also partly fictional, Orwell painstakingly narrates and documents without self-pity and often with humour a world of unrelenting drudgery and squalor - sleeping in bug-infested hostels and doss houses, working as a dishwasher in the vile ‘Hôtel X’ in Paris, surviving on scraps and cigarette butts, living alongside tramps, a star-gazing pavement artist and a starving Russian ex-army captain.

'Down and Out in Paris and London' is an unforgettable description of what being down and out is really like, giving some sobering ‘Orwellian’ truths about poverty and society - exposing a shocking, previously hidden world to readers Orwell gave a human face to poverty, and in doing so, found his voice as a great writer.

"A writer who can - and must - be rediscovered in every age." Irish Times