Free: Adventures on the Margins of a Wasteful Society, By Katherine Hibbert

At 26, Katherine Hibbert had a decent job as a journalist, invites to all the right parties and all the other treats of middle-class life. Then her quarter-life crisis kicked in. "I had begun to take it all for granted."

What to do? Most of us might have a moratorium on dining out. No such half measures for Hibbert, who eschewed spending money on anything for the next year, and gave up her possessions while she was at it. Cue her new life, filled with freeganism and an army of pierced, dreadlocked squatters.

If the reader overlooks the irony of the commerical benefits that Hibbert may reap from her "book about the experience", it is a fascinating study which proves that waste is aplenty and poverty hard to find in our consumer society.