Down and Out in Paris and London

Written when Orwell was a struggling writer in his twenties, it documents his 'first contact with poverty'. Here, he painstakingly documents a world of unrelenting drudgery and squalor - sleeping in bug-infested hostels and doss houses of last resort, working as a dishwasher in Paris's vile 'Hôtel X', surviving on scraps and cigarette butts, living alongside tramps, a star-gazing pavement artist and a starving Russian ex-army captain. Exposing a shocking, previously-hidden world to his readers, Orwell gave a human face to the statistics of poverty for the first time - and in doing so, found his voice as a writer.

• Homage to Catalonia
• The Kitchen Book & The Cook Book
• Kitchen Confidential Updated Edition: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly (P.S.)
• Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris
• Flash in the Pan: Life and Death of an American Restaurant
• Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook (P.S.)
• A Cook's Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines
• The Road to Wigan Pier
• Burmese Days: A Novel
• Up in the Old Hotel