18. The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class, Michael Collins
This book is a few years old now and would probably have been more impressive if I'd read it when it first came out. There has been more attention paid to the disenfranchisement of the white working class (both in the UK and the USA) following Brexit, Trump etc, so the polemic contained in this book probably reads as rather less original than it was at the time. I remember Michael Collins writing about these issues when it seemed that nobody else was, and many of his points have turned out to be central to what has happened to UK politics in recent years.
Parts of this were excellent - the descriptions of working class London life in the 60s were vivid, and Collins has many original things to say. Unfortunately, it suffered from both lack of clarity in its focus, and wooliness in the writing.
This is not in any way a "biography of the white working class". It's the story of the London white working class, concentrating for the most part on a small area at the back of the Elephant and Castle (an area that I know well). In some ways, this narrowness of focus works; Collins chooses to write about what he knows, and the personal recollections of his grandmother bring vivid detail to the descriptions. However, there's a double standard here, where Collins asks us to see the experiences of his own family and their near neighbours as representative of the experiences of an entire class, while at the same time constantly telling us how unique Southwark is. Even other London working class communities, such as those in the East End are rarely mentioned , let alone the experiences of urban working class people elsewhere in the UK. In the words of my Geordie friend, who hated the book: "F*cking cockneys, think they are the centre of the universe" 
While there are many citations and footnotes, there is also a lot of opinion presented as fact - or possibly fact presented as fact but without evidence. Here's Collins writing about race relations:
Statistics revealed that street crime in which a robbery was carried out on an individual and involved violence or the threat of violence was almost exclusively committed by young black males on white victims, who were largely female and frequently elderly
This assertion is one of the foundations of an interesting and valuable examination of race relations in traditionally white working class neighbours but seriously - no citation? no reference of where these "statistics" came from and who collected them?
Well worth a read, this one, but ultimately frustrating.
19. Wolf Hollow, Lauren Wolk
This is YA or possibly even a children's book. We're reading the Carnegie shortlist at work (I work in a secondary school) and this was my first allocated book.
"Annabelle has lived in Wolf Hollow all her life: a quiet place, still scarred by two world wars. But when cruel, manipulative Betty arrives in town, Annabelle's calm world is shattered, along with everything she's ever known about right and wrong.
When Betty disappears, suspicion falls on strange, gentle loner Toby. As Wolf Hollow turns against him, and tensions quickly mount, Annabelle must do everything in her power to protect Toby - and to find Betty, before it is too late."
Definite shades of Harper Lee in this one, and some beautiful writing about rural life in 1940s Pennsylvania. I will be buying this for my goddaughters :)