All Day Long

Reviews / Votes

Detailed, quirky and faithful in its likeness, yet simmers with the artist's rage at the unfairness of it all ... an intelligent, surprising and elegantly written book. -- Lucy Kellaway * FT * Biggs has a lovely, calm, measured style, with just a hint of menace behind it - like a tour guide in a stately home who suddenly pulls out a baseball bat and just holds it there, smiling. -- Julie Burchill Biggs is both an acute listener and a fine writer, and the combination makes her book a consistent and informative joy. -- Tim Adams * Observer * It feels like a good time to publish a book about work ... Biggs's quick eye and ease with description make her a lovely observer ... the potent, finely drawn impression it leaves is of workers sweating away in their own separate worlds, some happily, some not, most of them accepting of their lot. -- Andy Beckett * Guardian * A bravura study of our working nation ... a subtle, observant, quiet, devastating book -- Yasmin Alibhai-Brown * Independent * Joanna Biggs offers an excellent contribution to our knowledge of the world of work in all its variety - not through tedious sociological analysis (thank goodness), but through the stories of real people she has interviewed all over the country. Reading this book reminds me how times have changed dramatically since my generation left school or college in the Sixties with no worries about finding a job. We were lucky. -- Bel Mooney * Daily Mail * Biggs traces her wider narrative with a light touch, without using her interviews as a soapbox. Instead she lets the sad, funny, inspiring and alarming stories they tell take centre stage. -- Anthony Cummins * Metro * A compelling read and easy to dip into, with pithy vignettes ... The book rewards with some poignant insights ... a thoughtful read ... a neat idea, lucidly written, thoughtfully observed and well executed. -- David Cohen * Evening Standard * Brilliant -- Paul Mason * [on twitter] * Eloquent ... I liked the quietness of this book, the way its argument emerges organically out of the material rather than in polemic. -- Joe Moran * New Statesman * I thought All Day Long was a brilliant, varied and humane study of the way we have to live now. There's the great capitalist dream, in which we are fulfilled, rich, successful and (preferably) famous with it. Joanna Biggs shows us the brutal reality: one of youthful keenness, talent and desire to contribute, ill-served by a sometimes unequal and unfair job market in which what you can offer and what you get offered don't always match up. Biggs uses her peerless interviewing skills to draw truth, nuance, humour and subtlety from the people she speaks to. As a result All Day Long is beautifully complex and multi-faceted, an athropological study of hard, as-we-live-it capitalism which is judicious yet never overtly judgemental. -- Bidisha That rare thing, an insight into Britain with no ideological preconception ... sobering and surprising -- Tim Adams * Guardian Books of the Year *