Dishing the Dirt
- Author Nick Duerden
- Narrator Melanie Crawley
- Publisher Canbury Press Ltd
- Run Time 5 hours and 52 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Biography and non-fiction prose, Biography: general, Caretakers, janitors, housekeepers, cleaners and related skills.
Titles Purchased
- 1-5
- 6-10
- 11-15
- 16-20
- Over 20
Price p/Title
- €9.95
- €8.95
- €7.95
- €6.95
- €5.95
Listen to a sample
What to expect
Critics Review
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The Guardian review:
“Nick Duerden sets out to discover what it is like to clean houses for a living by talking to migrant workers who service the homes of contemporary Londoners.
“His eclectic cast of informants belong to this transitory workforce, men and women (but mostly women) who ‘hold the key to our real identities, to the people we really are, behind closed doors.’
“The result is an elegant portrait of the strained intimacies that grow up between cleaner and employer in 21st-century Britain.
“Dishing the Dirt is not a deeply researched tract, nor a tub-thumping polemic about precarious employment. Instead, driving Duerden’s inquiry is a fascination for the complex interior lives of people who usually play an off-stage role in our personal dramas. Despite the size of the industry, with perhaps as many as one in three UK households employing a cleaner, the realities of waged domestic labour are little known beyond those who actually do it.
“Duerden offers the people who vacuum carpets a chance to speak freely and at length about their hopes and dreams, anxieties and disappointments. It is less an exercise in titillating gossip than a study in what makes all of us painfully human….His book succeeds brilliantly in dismantling casual assumptions about the drudgery of cleaning – and about the kinds of people who do it for a living.’
Helen McCarthy, The Guardian, 2020
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/15/dishing-the-dirt-by-nick-duerden-review-the-hidden-lives-of-house-cleaners
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