Top 10 books about cleaners

Amanda Craig is a British novelist, short-story writer and critic. Born in South Africa in 1959, she grew up in Italy, where her parents worked for the UN, and was educated at Bedales School and Clare College Cambridge.

The heroine in Craig's The Golden Rule is "a graduate and an impoverished and abused single mother who gets suckered by a rich woman into a plot to murder each other’s husbands. She discovers a very different story as a result of cleaning her intended victim’s home."

At the Guardian the author tagged ten top books on cleaners, "undervalued workers and their sharp perspectives on those they tidy up after." One title on the list:

The Maid by Nita Prose

Unlike the grim Netflix series of the same name, this is a joy. Larky, orphaned Molly is “the last person anyone invites to a party”. She adores her job as a cleaner in a swanky New York hotel but when she finds the body of a guest she is put in the frame for his murder and must turn detective. Molly makes us feel her pleasure in what is crisply starched, perfectly ordered and formally correct, but as a neurodivergent person in a dangerous city she also has a terrible inability to spot dishonesty.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue