Showing results for "love-" in Dark Humour

At dinner parties and over coffee, Rabih and Kirsten's friends always ask them the same question: how did you meet? The answer comes easily - it's a happy story, one they both love to tell. But there is a second part to this story, the answer to a question their friends never ask: what happened next? Rabih and Kirsten find each other, fall in love, get married. Society tells us this is the end of the story. In fact it is only the beginning.

Joe Goldberg is done with cities, done with the muck and the posers, done with Love. Now, he's saying hello to nature, to simple pleasures on a cosy island in the Pacific Northwest. For the first time in a long time, he can just breathe. He gets a job at the local library—he does know a thing or two about books—and that's where he meets her: Mary Kay DiMarco. Librarian.

Marina is a divorced mother of three preschoolers. Lilah is a shy and lonely librarian. Opal is a broke post-menopausal fitness guru. These three strangers have nothing in common-except for the man who's been lying to all of them. And who they are now holding hostage in a basement. EAT, SLAY, LOVE is a book about making friends, finding joy, and discovering the woman you really are . . . though sometimes, becoming your best self involves committing abduction and murder.

Kieran's love life didn't get off to a good start. He threw up after his first kiss; he was beaten up by the first girl to have a crush on him; and after a mix-up with his first love letter, he could only sit back and watch as the entire school mistook him for a brutal murderer. By the time the hormones kicked in, Kieran had all but given up on love, but the worst was yet to come.

Opening in the late 1980s as rave culture is born and moving into the 1990s, Men In Love reunites the Trainspotting crew for a riotous new journey. Renton, Spud, Sick Boy and Begbie leave heroin behind and seek joy, and the hope of redemption, on the dance floor. Each wants to feel alive in the closing years of Thatcher’s Britain, and they fill their days with sex and romance and trying to get ahead. Taking in Edinburgh, London, Amsterdam and Paris, the group charges towards an unexpected event: Sick Boy’s wedding day.

Single mum Jules lives next to a tennis club, but has no plans to play. Especially when her old school crush, handsome doctor Sam Delaney, returns from the USA thirty years after leaving and is now displaying a killer forehand in direct view of her bedroom window. Despite what she tells her personal trainer fiancé, Jules finds exercise as tedious in her 40s as she did as a teenager. But when she's hit by perimenopause and her 19-year-old daughter's solo trip around the world - she's in urgent need of a distraction and rashly agrees to join an amateur women's tennis team.

Taut, brooding and densely atmospheric, these stories show us the ways in which murder can arise out of boredom, perversity can result from adolescent curiosity and sheer evil might be the solution to unbearable loneliness.

Can 'no' be a declaration of love? What happens when love is savage, dangerous and all-consuming? In this gorgeous and unsettling collection, women navigate the complexities and cruelties of desire across time and place, from a medieval convent to a Victorian parlour to a 1990s high school. Intensely atmospheric, surprising and darkly funny, this collection is a richly flavoured feast from a brilliant writer in full command of the form.

Lachlan Kane, killer professionista, vorrebbe ritirarsi dagli "affari" e dimenticare il passato dedicandosi al suo negozio di pelletteria. Impresa tutt'altro che facile... fino a quando Lark Montague, cantante indie nonché migliore amica della ragazza di suo fratello, gli propone un accordo: lui darà la caccia a un assassino e lei gli garantirà la libertà. Perché il piano funzioni, però, dovranno sposarsi.

In the cult classic novel Bunny, Samantha Heather Mackey, a lonely outsider student at a highly selective MFA program in New England, was first ostracised and then seduced by a clique of her saccharine sweet, rich girl cohort (who call one another ‘Bunny’). An invitation to the Bunnies’ Smut Salon leads Samantha down a dark rabbit hole (pun intended) into the violently surreal world of their off-campus Workshops where monstrous creations are conjured with wondrous yet deadly consequences.

Gwen’s life has stalled. She’s in her mid-thirties, perpetually single, her friends are busy procreating in the country and conversations with her parents seem to revolve entirely around herbaceous borders and the council’s wheelie-bin timetable. Above all she’s lonely. But then, isn’t everyone? When Gwen’s made redundant from a job she drifted into a decade ago and never left, she realises it’s time to make a change.

Shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards, 2006

George Hall doesn't understand the modern obsession with talking about everything. 'The secret of contentment, George felt, lay in ignoring many things completely.' Some things in life, however, cannot be ignored. At 57, George is settling down to a comfortable retirement, building a shed in his garden, reading historical novels, listening to a bit of light jazz.

One ordinary morning, Laurie's husband, Mark, vanishes, leaving behind his phone and wallet. For weeks, she tells no one, carrying on her job as a cleaner at the local university, visiting her tricky, dementia-suffering father and holing up in her tower-block flat with a bottle to hand. When she finally reports Mark as missing, the police are suspicious. Why did she take so long? Wasn't she worried? It turns out there are many more mysteries in Laurie's account of events, though not just because she glosses over the facts.

As the only Black women at an antebellum-themed wedding, Kayla and Zorie should’ve known this heist was doomed from the start. They should never have come, but when their financial situation became dire, they agreed to hit one last wedding. Jaded and cynical Kayla has spent the last decade trying to fix her life since an angsty teen prank led to her arrest. Now, with her housekeeping job at a subpar hotel and her disappointing, Cinderella-esque relationship with her dad and obnoxious stepsister, she hates the life she’s built.

In the playful style of Tom Robbins, Ed Abbey, and Kurt Vonnegut, Shawn Hartje’s Pipeliner is a laugh-out-loud journey through ‘90s culture. Idaho, 1993: Seventeen-year-old Jason Krabb falls for a girl from the other side of town who’s mixed up with a ragtag crew of pipeliners bringing gas lines through the high desert. Jason’s hilariously naive struggle to distinguish himself as one of the crew while attempting to leave his mark on the ‘90s grunge scene is a stirring reflection on adolescence.

One of the many well-educated Ivy League graduates with literary ambitions who flock to New York City every year, 25-year-old Melissa Fleischer has the great fortune to work as the assistant to Austin Bloch, an editor responsible for refining and publishing the work of some of America's most esteemed writers. But after she begins working at this prestigious magazine in the late 1970s, Mel soon learns that the extravagantly long lunches her boss indulges in actually belie his affairs with a stream of young women.

Alicia Erian's characters are brave, disarming, affectionate, and deeply flawed. They inhabit the not-so-very-wide space between a good intention and a bad outcome. The Brutal Language of Love challenges traditional notions of right and wrong with what has become Erian's signature—an achingly stylish humor and a deep understanding of the brutal truth about human nature. These surprising, provocative, and deeply resonant stories marked the emergence of a major talent.

Years after escaping her unbearable artworld friends in New York for a new life in London, an unnamed writer finds herself back on the Lower East Side attending a dinner party hosted by Eugene and Nicole – an artist-curator couple – and attended by their pretentious circle. It’s the evening after the funeral of their mutual friend, a failed actress, and if the narrator once loved and admired Eugene and Nicole and their important friends, she now despises them all.

Aspiring chef Hannah Wendt has a multitude of talents - prowess in the kitchen and in the bedroom - but also a penchant for disposing of bothersome chefs. Wronged by those who steal her recipes, ridicule her weight, and denigrate her talents, Hannah has turned in her apron as sous chef and food stylist to plow new territory - her overpowering hunger for revenge. Hooked on how tasty payback can be, soon she is bumping off famous chefs who've burned her ego with spectacular culinary flair.

A contract enforcer for a drug kingpin steals a car, brutally murders a young couple in their home, and begins an epidemic that will eventually turn half the world into flesh eating zombies. And he's the hero! Tapper wasn't always soulless. In fact, he was a decorated patriot of high character and honor. But this story isn't about any of that. It's about the man he was after the operation. The man the doctors said had lost his soul. A lost soul with such training and expertise should have been guided, not abandoned. But he's not bitter. In fact, he's loving life.