Skip to main content
Devastating dispatches from the war against the poor
LIZ JONES recommends a visceral account of one woman's experience of life on the margins in Britain now
Endlessly resourceful: Cash Carraway

Skint Estate
by Cash Carraway
(Penguin Random House, £14.99)

OPEN Skint Estate on almost any page and you are likely to encounter shit, semen or blood.

From page one, where we find the narrator hiding in a train toilet to avoid buying a ticket and discovering that her jeans are smeared in “someone else’s shit” from the toilet pan, to the smell of stale semen at the peep show where she works, to a blood-drenched account of how she “lost her vagina” during a botched childbirth, this is a book soaked in bodily fluids.   

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The 95th Anniversary Appeal
Support the Morning Star
You have reached the free limit.
Subscribe to continue reading.
Similar stories
lighthouse
Poetry / 7 July 2026
7 July 2026

ALAN MORRISON welcomes a new collection from the most imaginative and committed ecopoet of our time

kae tempest
Book Review / 7 July 2026
7 July 2026

CAL McBRIDE relishes the lyrical truth of an unstable identity in an over-tidy and conventional social realist treatment

Mujician
Books / 3 June 2026
3 June 2026

CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician

crime
Crime Fiction / 12 August 2025
12 August 2025

Timeloop murder, trad family MomBomb, Sicilian crime pages and Craven praise