Showing titles in Dark Humour

Don’t Make Me Laugh balances anger and humour with the deftest of touches. It is a story about power and control and manipulation, about gendered roles in both the workplace and our personal lives, and about how women are set up in competition with each other. And ultimately—satisfyingly—it’s a story about fighting back.

Set in 1970s Melbourne, The Removalists tells the story of sisters Kate and Fiona, who have come to tell the police about Fiona's husband Kenny's physical abuse.

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.

Recently dumped and stuck with the mortgage, artist Esther Ray wants to burn the world, but instead, she reluctantly accepts a scrapbooking job from the deliriously wealthy Naomi Duncan. The scrapbooks, a secret birthday gift for Naomi's husband Bryce, trace the Duncan's twenty-five-year marriage. As Esther binges true-crime podcasts and works through the near-two hundred-boxes of Duncan detritus, she finds herself infatuated with the gilded family - until, mid-project, Naomi dies suspiciously.

Strange things are afoot in the city of Lviv, western Ukraine. Seagulls are circling and the air smells salty, though Lviv is a long way from the sea. A ragtag group gathers round a mysterious grave in Lychakiv Cemetery - among them an ex-KGB officer and an ageing hippy he used to spy on. Before long, Captain Ryabtsev and Alik Olisevych are teaming up to discover the source of the "anomalies". Meanwhile, Taras ­- who makes a living driving kidney-stone patients over cobblestones in his Opel Vectra - is courting Darka, who works nights at a bureau de change despite being allergic to money.

In their lovely old Cotswolds village, Janet and Susan are known to all the other villagers as “the girls”—a fixture. Partners in love and work, co-proprietors of a picturesque shop specializing in the work of local artisans and farmers, they lead an enviable, enviably settled life. So it’s no catastrophe when Sue, the younger of the two, feels the need to take a month to travel on her own, leaving Jan alone to run their stall at the Inland Waterways Rally Craft Fair.

Joanne Haynes has a secret: that is not her real name. And there’s more. Her flat’s not hers. Her cats aren't hers. Even her hair isn’t really hers. Nor is she any of the other women she pretends to be. Not the best-selling romance novelist who gets her morning snack from the doughnut van on the seafront. Nor the pregnant woman in the dental surgery. Nor the chemo patient in the supermarket for whom the cashier feels ever so sorry. They're all just alibis. In fact, the only thing that’s real about Joanne is that nobody can know who she really is.

In the tradition of Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain, America Fantastica delivers a biting, witty, and entertaining story about the causes and costs of outlandish fantasy, while also marking the triumphant return of an essential voice in American letters. And at the heart of the novel, amid a teeming cast of characters, readers will delight in the tug-of-war between two memorable and iconic human beings—the exuberant savior-of-souls Angie Bing and the penitent but compulsive liar Boyd Halverson.

Fat girl, thin girl. Red hair, brown hair. Polish aristocrat, radical husband. Joan Foster has dozens of different identities, and she's utterly confused by them all. After a life spent running away from difficult situations, she decides to escape to a hill town in Italy to take stock of her life. But first she must carefully arrange her own death.

The characters in this extraordinary book are often - on the surface - depraved, vicious, cowardly and manipulative, but their essential humanity is never undermined. Two professors of philosophy turn pugilists; Leith removal men become the objects of desire for Hollywood goddesses; God turns Boab Coyle into a house-fly; and in the novella, 'A Smart Cunt', the drug-addled young hero spins off on a collision course with his past.

Thermonuclear war erupts in Kerry Shale's award-winning 1993 dramatisation of the classic apocalyptic black comedy. Dr Strangelove came to prominence in the 1964 film, directed by Stanley Kubrick. Based on the novel Red Alert by Peter George, it famously starred Peter Sellers in multiple roles. As well as scripting the dramatisation, Kerry Shale also takes multiple roles: Dr Strangelove, Lieutenant 'Sweets' Kivel, Lieutenant Barney Goldberg, Lieutenant Lothar Zogg, Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, General Jack D. Ripper and President Merkin Muffley.

Obituary writer Bud Stanley isn’t really living his best life. He’s fallen into a funk after a divorce. (She left him for another man, who, in fairness, was far more interesting). He’s not doing his job well. He’s given up on dating. And he’s about to be fired for accidentally publishing his own obituary one mildly drunken night (though technically the company can’t legally fire a dead person).

Ferdinand Mount’s stinging satire plunges into the dubious world of London PR firms, the back rooms of Westminster and the campaign trail in Africa and America. We follow the hapless Dickie Pentecost, redundant diplomatic correspondent for a foundering national newspaper, together with his stern oncologist wife, Jane, and their daughters, Flo, an aspiring ballerina, and the quizzical teenager Lucy.

One of the 21st century's most celebrated authors, Hilary Mantel won the Booker Prize twice: for 2009's Wolf Hall, the first in her phenomenally successful Thomas Cromwell trilogy, and its 2012 sequel Bring Up the Bodies. The third novel in the series, 2020's The Mirror and the Light, won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. This collection includes three of her best works of contemporary fiction, ranging from the Gothic to the blackly comic.

If you are looking for epic space battles, if you are looking for generals achieving victory through genius tactics, if you are looking for berserker warriors carrying empires aloft on their swords, look elsewhere my friends. Here, you will find laughter. Here, a quartermaster must discover why the human insists that the mass produced broom, identical down to the molecule to every other broom on the base, is the "wrong" broom, and why and how they expect him to fix it.

I’ve woken up in the Big Apple with the world's worst hangover, an empty bank account, and the sinking feeling that my life just nosedived. Last night's escapade is a blur, but one thing is clear: I’ve been swindled and I’m not happy about it.​ The culprit? Harry – a total dreamboat and my worst nightmare. He’s got charm, secrets, and a smile that screams trouble. Little did I know, Harry's not just a pretty face – he's a liar, conman and he’s turned my life upside down.​ ​When I discover I’m not the only victim, I decide it’s only right I take my revenge.

Winston Kang and Jared Cahill seem like the perfect couple. When they check-in for their flight to Cambodia, where they're headed to meet the surrogate carrying their baby girl, even the woman at the airline counter recognizes it: "I'm so happy that marriage is legal for you guys," she says. But while Jared is already planning for their second kid—half white like him, half Korean like Wynn—Wynn isn't ready to give up his dreams of becoming a hip-hop dancer to become "the hostage of a crying, pooping terrorist." So he does what anyone in his position would do: He leaves Jared at the airport.

Henri Koskinen firmly believes in the power of common sense and order. That is until he moves in with Laura Helanto and her daughter. As Henri realises he has inadvertently become part of a group of local dads, a competing adventure park is seeking to expand their operations, not always sticking to the law in the process. Is it possible to combine the increasingly dangerous world of the adventure-park business with the unpredictability of life in a blended family? At first glance, the two appear to have only one thing in common: neither deals particularly well with a mounting body count.

Bubba’s back from Fairyland, and sometimes it feels like they shoulda just stayed there! Man, coming back to the real world sucks. Bubba and his whole team have been fired on account of going MIA for a year and a half (yeah, time moves differently in Fairyland - yay), and now they’ve got to…get jobs? Oh, this is going to go well.

The legendary Lone Star Cafe, a little corner of Texas right in the heart of New York City. At one time or another, everyone from the Rolling Stones to Willie Nelson has jammed there. But this night, Thanksgiving eve, there's a different type of jam at the Lone Star. Larry Barkin, half of the headlining Barkin Brothers, is found dead in his dressing room, his head bashed in with his own guitar and a two dollar bill stuffed in his shirt pocket. It's Kinky they call for help, but the fast-talking, cigar-smoking country singer turned amateur detective has other plans.