Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain's Underclass
by Darren McGarvey
(Luath Press, £7.99)

THIS is an unflinching and courageous insight into Darren McGarvey's personal life and the social conditions which crushed him, until an epiphany led to a radical change in his outlook and approach.

Growing up in Pollok, the south-west Glasgow housing estate where physical and verbal violence was the norm – and where debt was incurred by “acting like we had more money than we did” because the price of looking poor “was always far higher” – is an experience, McGarvey says, that is very rarely represented, reported and discussed.