The Night Cleaner

The idea was simple: pack a suitcase, go to another city where you have no connections and try to find a job, anonymously. That was the idea that took Florence Aubenas - one of France's most accomplished undercover journalists - on a journey into the worst recession since the Great Depression. Day after day she searched for work, one unemployed worker among others, with no special skills or qualifications. She immersed herself in the crowd of job seekers, going from one employment office to another, eventually managing to cobble together a few hours working as a night cleaner on a ferry that crossed the English Channel. For many people the global financial crisis seems real enough but remote from their daily lives. They have little sense of what it really means to be unemployed in the midst of a recession. Florence Aubenas was determined to find out. This book is the story of her journey. The Night Cleaner became an instant number one bestseller in France and has subsequently become a bestseller in many countries throughout the world. Better than any academic treatise on the topic, this book shows what recession means today.

Spanning two decades of research and writing, this volume presents the influential and insightful work of Sally Alexander, one of Britain's most reputed feminist historians. Whether analyzing women's factory work, the emergence of the Victorian women's movement, or women's voices during the Spanish civil war, or charting the lives of women in the inter-war years, Alexander's accounts are original and thoughtful. Moving from a discussion of class and sexual difference to a reading of subjectivity informed by psychoanalysis, Alexander exposes the relationship between memory, history, and the unconscious. Her focus ranges from a descriptive rendering of the 1970's Nightcleaners campaign to a more exploratory account of becoming a woman in 1920's and 30's London. Becoming A Woman offers up a fascinating exploration of important historical moments and of the process of writing feminist history.

The Cleaner's only crime was to fall in love, and of course it had to be with the spider Kings favourite daughter. In the hope that he would get killed, the King set The Cleaner three tasks. The first was to get the right toe nail off a giant. The second a moonbeam. And the third the end of a lions tail. He successfully completed all the tasks, with the help of his friend Earwig. They both nearly got killed many times. But in the end the king agreed to let them marry, with fatal consequences.

“Welcome to the office building at night, an eerie ship helmed by one woman desperate for connection.” —Julia Fine, author of Maddalena and the Dark Every night, she cleans. On the fourth floor of an unnamed office in an unnamed city, the night cleaner comes and does what she does best—sorts out the messes of the daytime employees. None of them know her, but she knows everything about them: Sad Intern’s dreams to get promoted, Résumé Woman’s nasty flight-risk behavior, Mr. Buff’s secret smoking habit (not very conducive to his fitness journey). She’s the office mastermind, the one everyone needs, and no one even knows she exists. And tonight, while scrolling through your emails, she’ll discover the secret you’ve been hiding—the one that will put everyone’s job at risk. After all, protecting the employees is her responsibility: whether it’s from rats and window smudges or from the sinister CEO who may be driving the company into ruin. And you’re about to find out that, sometimes, your most powerful enemy is the one you don’t even see.

The Cleaner of Kastoria enters the past and present of Dina, a young village girl whose wild decision sets her on an unforgetable odyssey through the horrors and tragedy of the Greek civil war. Leading her Democratic Army unit of girls through icy rivers and bloody battles she is haunted by memories of her young husband. Dina still guards her dark secrets in the aftermath of the Colonels' dictatorship of 1974. As a housecleaner Dina faces her final challenge from Vassiliki the monarchist