Maid

BARACK OBAMA'S SUMMER READING PICK, 2019.
BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK.

Educated meets Nickel and Dimed in Stephanie Land's memoir about working as a maid. A beautiful and gritty exploration of poverty in the western world. Includes a foreword by international bestelling author Barbara Ehrenreich.

'My daughter learned to walk in a homeless shelter.'

As a struggling single mum, determined to keep a roof over her daughter's head, Stephanie Land worked for years as a maid, working long hours in order to provide for her small family. In Maid, she reveals the dark truth of what it takes to survive and thrive in today's inequitable society.

As she worked hard to climb her way out of poverty as a single parent, scrubbing the toilets of the wealthy, navigating domestic labour jobs as a cleaner whilst also juggling higher education, assisted housing, and a tangled web of government assistance, Stephanie wrote. She wrote the true stories that weren't being told. The stories of the overworked and underpaid.

Written in honest, heart-rending prose and with great insight, Maid explores the underbelly of the upper-middle classes and the reality of what it's like to be in service to them. 'I'd become a nameless ghost,' Stephanie writes. With this book, she gives voice to the 'servant' worker, those who fight daily to scramble and scrape by for their own lives and the lives of their children.

Auteur

Stephanie Land

Résumé
A little dedication goes a long way.That's why Catriona Robinson, the country's favourite children's author, always dedicated her books to those who touched her life the most - not least Emily, her reclusive granddaughter.Emily never thought too much about these dedications. But when Catriona dies unexpectedly, each one becomes a cryptic clue in a breadcrumb trail that apparently leads to her lost, unpublished manuscript. It's a mystery only Emily can solve. But to do so she will have to walk in her grandmother's footsteps, into the wider world she's spent her whole life hiding away from . . .