All Day Long

Joanna Biggs is a writer and editor at the London Review of Books and has written for the Guardian, New Yorker and Sunday Times. She was born in London and educated at Oxford, the Sorbonne and London.

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 is both an acute listener and a fine writer, and the combination makes her book a consistent and informative joy. -- Tim Adams Observer 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 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 Brilliant -- Paul Mason [on twitter] 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 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 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 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 Spectator A bravura study of our working nation ... a subtle, observant, quiet, devastating book -- Yasmin Alibhai-Brown Independent 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 If you believe Britain is an under-described territory, you will welcome a brilliant new voice in non-fiction, Joanna Biggs. Her debut, All Day Long: a Portrait of Britain at Work is so well-written I'm taking it on holiday to read again. Biggs writes profiles of workers in different parts of the country, demonstrating fantastic delicacy and a true passion for accuracy, discovering the pulse of austerity in the way we get busy now ... she brings the spirit of Studs Terkel onto the British scene. Read a terrific profile each night before you fall asleep and dream of a greener and more pleasant land. -- Andrew O'Hagan Daily Telegraph