Overview

What happens behind the Farrow&Ball painted front door in English homes. Cath Buckley came to live-in care sideways, through financial necessity, through aging, through other options quietly closing. What she found was a largely unregulated world where agencies promise the earth to families and deliver next to nothing to carers, where self-employment means no sick pay, no holiday pay, and no recourse when a client accuses you, a family demeans you, or a placement simply ends because someone has died. A Very Modern Slavery is a darkly witty, unflinching account of what it actually means to care for Britain's elderly and that world told from the inside. Buckley moves between clients named Schoolhouse White, Komodo Dragon, Big Cat, and Slipper Satin, and the parallel life she assembles in the gaps between placements. The contrast between overheated English bungalows and wide open blue sea isn't escapism, it's the engine that keeps her going and the mechanism by which the book quietly builds its case. This is a book about labour and exploitation, about the quiet indignities of class and dependency, about what it costs to care for strangers in their own homes. It is also, unexpectedly, a book about freedom, the particular freedom of someone with nowhere she has to be and nothing left to lose by telling the truth.

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