It is a work of sharp social observation, documenting the lives of Birmingham factory workers in the interwar boom years.

The novel has been acclaimed for making Green "an honorary member of a literary movement to which he never belonged",[2] i.e. the genre of proletarian literature.

[2] Living tells the story of several iron foundry workers in the West Midlands city of Birmingham, England in the 1920s.

The key narrative progressions centre on Lily Gates, the novel's female protagonist, and her courting with Bert Jones, one of the factory workers.

[1] This represents the male hierarchy's imposed ownership on everything physical and even metaphysical—Lily's freedom—in addition to the impossibility to seek an escape route.

Neither are successful, and their respective failures are indicative of the constraints that social norms and the status quo place upon people of both working and upper classes.