Men at Work — Jerry Raine

‘Men at Work' consists of eighteen short stories, mainly based around a different job the author held at some point in his life. The stories are arranged by age, starting off with a sixteen year old in the Australian bush and ending with an unemployed man in his sixties on the Isle of Wight. Stretching from the 1970s to 2017 the stories deal with unskilled men struggling to make ends meet in the blue collar working environment, who often resort to extreme measures to keep themselves solvent. Follow the fortunes of a farm hand and a caravan fitter, factory workers and retail workers, a gardener, a cop, and a folk singer, in a world where things frequently go wrong, and average pay doesn't make up for bad times had. ‘Absolutely authentic and quite possibly important...ten times more relevant than any judicial rant about our troubled times.' The Literary Review. ‘This guy should be known as Acid Raine.' Yorkshire Post. 'Hunt this one out, it's worth the bother.' The Independent.