This book is about the impact of austerity in and on everyday life, based on a two-year ethnography with families and communities in Argleton, Greater Manchester, UK. Focused on family, friends and intimate relations, and their intersections, the book develops a relational approach to everyday austerity. It reveals how austerity is a deeply personal and social condition, with impacts that spread across and between everyday relationships, spaces and temporal perspectives. It demonstrates how austerity is  lived and felt on the ground, with distinctly uneven socio-economic consequences. Furthermore, everyday relationships are subject to change and continuity in times of austerity. Austerity also has lasting impacts on personal and shared experiences, both in terms of day-to-day practices and the lifecourses people imagine themselves living.

Dr Sarah Marie Hall is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Manchester. Her research sits in the broad field of geographical feminist political economy: understanding how everyday socio-economic processes are shaped by gender relations, lived experience and social difference.

Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Family, Friendship and Intimacy: A Relational Approach to Everyday Austerity.- Chapter 3: Everyday Social Infrastructures and Tapestries of Care in Times of Austerity.- Chapter 4: Austere Intimacies and Intimate Austerities.- Chapter 5: The Personal is Political (and Relational).- Chapter 6: A Very Personal Crisis: Family Fragilities and Everyday Conjunctures in Austerity.- Chapter 7: Conclusion.