Showing results by publisher "-emdashery books-" in Comedy & Humour

It’s 2006, and terror scaremongering in the media has rattled the residents of sleepy, suburban Dunlop Crescent. When a Maori family moves into number 14, the local cranks assume they are Middle Eastern terrorists hell-bent on destroying the Australian way of life. Rumour has it that they plan to turn their house to face Mecca. This sets off an extraordinary chain of events that embroils the entire neighbourhood as well as cynical media figures, bumbling antiterrorist police and a gang of white supremacists with a radical plan to wake up the country and ‘preserve Australian values’.

When Tilda Finch is diagnosed with invisibility, she's not overly surprised—she's felt invisible for years. She has a good life and a successful business called This Is A Sign, selling inspirational quotes on merchandise. But she's never really recovered from her divorce. Or, if she's honest, her childhood. Tilda's past has taken a toll and she's lost sight of herself. Now, with the possibility of completely disappearing, she must face the trauma of her past and rewrite the way she perceives the world, and herself.

Rue Siebert might not have it all, but she has enough: a few friends she can always count on, the financial stability she yearned for as a kid, and a successful career as a biotech engineer at Kline, one of the most promising start-ups in the field of food science. Her world is stable, pleasant, and hard-fought. Until a hostile takeover and its offensively attractive front man threatens to bring it all crumbling down. Eli Killgore and his business partners want Kline, period.

Outsider. Misfit. Criminal. Convict. . . . Movie star. Family man. Comedy legend. Joey Diaz has been called every name in the book (and then some). Now, for the first time, he shares the story of his unlikely rise to fame in his own words—with no punches pulled.

At first glance, the murder of Peggy Frampton looks like a burglary gone wrong. But DS George Cross, with his meticulous methods, thinks otherwise. The victim, a former mayor of Bristol, is now an online influencer whose forthright opinions attract the kind of attention that most people would like to avoid. There's no shortage of suspects. Cross's investigation will lead him from Peggy's unfaithful husband to her gambling-addicted son, to a scorned former lover with a grudge. But she also has political enemies in her past.

A voice is calling across the land, "Bombardier Milligan." "Bombadier Milligan is dead," I replied in a disguised voice. The voice replied, "Then he's going to miss his breakfast." The fourth volume of Spike Milligan's legendary account of his time in the army during World War Two begins as he and his regiment land in sunny Italy in 1943 ("The ship touched the beach very gently, so gently I suspect it's not insured").

Lucas Thorn wasn't born a cheater. All it took was a single moment - say, a certain disastrous incident on the night before his wedding - and boom. Reputation destroyed forever and always. So now he owns it. He has a lady friend for every night of the week (except Sundays - God's day and all), and his rules are simple: No commitments. No exceptions. But a certain smart-mouthed, strawberry blonde vixen is about to blow that all to hell.

Waldo is ravenous. Horny. Blunt. Naive. Wise. Impulsive. Lonely. Angry. Hurting. Endlessly wanting. And the thing she wants most of all? Mr. Korgy, her creative writing teacher. Mr. Korgy, with the wife and the kid and the mortgage and the bills, with the dead dreams and the atrophied looks and the growing paunch. She doesn't know why she wants him.

Waking up in a tacky coffin and wearing off-brand shoes, Betsy Taylor can't believe the horrible turn her life has taken; then she discovers she's a vampire. Soon, Betsy becomes a participant in a power struggle between the forces of darkness. With only her friend Jessica and the hunky vampire Sinclair to help her, this new "Queen of Vampires" will have a tough time getting her afterlife straight.

Alexandra is falling apart. She's just lost her job, her husband barely acknowledges her existence and her daughter hates her. The only place she truly feels seen, is online. She loves nothing more than the rush of emotion when she sees a blinking notification, a heart on one of her posts. Here, in this filtered reality, this community of women means she doesn't feel quite so alone, after all. Until, one day, everything changes. And she'll do everything in her power to put it right.

Richard is a middle-aged Englishman who runs a B&B in the fictional Val de Follet in the Loire Valley. Nothing ever happens to Richard, and really that’s the way he likes it. One day, however, one of his older guests disappears, leaving behind a bloody handprint on the wallpaper. Another guest, the exotic Valérie, persuades a reluctant Richard to join her in investigating the disappearance. Richard remains a dazed passenger in the case until things become really serious and someone murders Ava Gardner, one of his beloved hen...and you don’t mess with a fellow’s hens!

Tim Key is never far from stage and screen - from Peep Show to Alpha Papa to Taskmaster. But now he's back doing what he does best - attempting to recite poetry whilst tormenting his friend and musician, the equally brilliant and long-suffering Tom Basden. From ruminating on the meaning of family via his narrative poem 'The Godfather', attempting to get to the bottom of death via his poem 'The Boy Who Faked His Own Death' and also organising an impromptu stag party, Tim Key uses poetry to help him understand every situation.

Hair stylist Kit Cooper is at the top of her game. She does the shows in Milan and Paris, tends to pop stars and celebrities, and has styled enough campaigns and magazine covers to last a lifetime. But Kit is ambitious. Restless. She can't help asking: what's next? One day, frustrated she can't find the perfect product for a look, she wonders ... could she make it herself?

Felicity Lewis' 50th birthday party in her newly renovated home, loving husband and daughter Greta by her side, is going off with a bang when disaster strikes. Her father, Franklyn, with his usual impeccable timing, has keeled over and died. For some members of the family, his wife Hazel, for example, Franklyn's death is not the great loss it first appears to be. But when his toxic and inexplicable will is read out, it becomes clear that long-buried secrets are about to surface, starting with the astonishing reappearance of Hazel's long-lost sister.

Dirk Gently has an unshakeable belief in the interconnectedness of all things, but his Holistic Detective Agency mainly succeeds in tracking down missing cats for old ladies. Then Dirk stumbles upon an old friend behaving bizarrely - and he's drawn into a four-billion-year-old mystery that must be solved if the human race is to avoid immediate extinction.

In a small town in Sweden it appears to be an ordinary day. But look more closely, and you'll see a mysterious masked figure approaching a bank. Two hours later, chaos has descended. A bungled attempted robbery has developed into a hostage situation - and the offender is refusing to communicate their demands to the police. Inside the building, fear quickly turns to irritation for the seven strangers trapped inside. But as the minutes tick by, they begin to suspect that the criminal mastermind holding them hostage might be more in need of rescuing than they are.

There are only three things in this world that are certain: death, taxes, and babies. Nobody knows this truth better than Emily McCoy, a third year resident working in Baby City, the affectionate nickname for the busy Labor and Delivery unit at a New York City hospital. On a typical day in Baby City, Emily delivers more babies than the number of hours of sleep she manages to squeeze in that night. And definitely more than the number of dates she's been on since she started her training in OB/GYN two years earlier.

Armageddon Day. That is how history will remember the date when two Overlords clashed amidst the war-torn streets of New Whitehall. The disastrous duel its explosive conclusion wreaked heavy casualties on the two armies present, rendering both the Ishigar Republic and the Lodrak Empire unable to continue to fight. And yet, it was no stalemate. With one Hero defeated and another revealed, the balance of power is sure to shift in the elvish nation’s favor.

An over-achieving teenager in New York City, Luna Johnson, accidentally becomes a medium and starts to crack from seeing ghosts everywhere.

He doesn't believe in happy endings. She's lost her faith that they exist. But could they find one together? January is a hopeless romantic who likes narrating her life as if she's the heroine in a blockbuster movie. Augustus is a serious literary type who thinks true love is a fairy-tale. January and Augustus are not going to get on.