Showing titles in Dark Humour

Ray is not a bad guy. He mostly did not cheat on his heavily pregnant wife. He only sometimes despises every one of his friends. And though his career as a freelance tech journalist is dismal and he spends his afternoons churning out third-rate listicles in his boxer briefs, he dreams of making a difference. But Ray is about to learn that his special talent is for making things worse.

Fresh out of university, 20-year-old Témì has a clear plan for her future: she is going to surgically enlarge her backside like all the other Nigerian women, move from Ile-Ife to Lagos, and meet a man who will love her senseless. When she finally finds the courage to tell her mother, older sister, and aunties, at the funeral of her beloved father, her announcement causes an uproar - because in Nigerian families, none of your business is private. Not even if it’s about your bumbum.

The Late Mattia Pascal (Italian: Il fu Mattia Pascal) is a 1904 novel by Luigi Pirandello. It is one of his best-known works and was his first major treatment of the theme of the mask. The protagonist, Mattia Pascal, finds that his promising youth has, through misfortune or misdeed, dissolved into a dreary dead-end job and a miserable marriage.

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.

Joe Orton was among the towering geniuses of 1960s theatre. His life was tragically cut short in 1967, but he left behind him a handful of shocking and scabrous black comedies that will live on in the public imagination for years to come. Featured here are two of his lesser-known works, The Erpingham Camp and The Ruffian on the Stair, collected together as a double bill.

Patrick Melrose, cleaned-up and world-weary, is a reluctant guest at a glittering party deep in the English countryside. Amid a crowd of flitting social dragonflies, he finds his search for redemption and capacity for forgiveness challenged by his observation of the cruelties around him. Armed with his biting wit and a newly fashioned openness, can Patrick, who has been to the furthest limits of experience and back again, find release from the savageries of his childhood?

Helen, a graduate student on a quest to save the planet, is one of the best minds of her generation. But when her irreplaceable advisor’s student sex scandal is exposed, she must choose whether to give up on her work or accompany him to RIP, a research institute which grants safe harbour to the disgraced and the deplorable. As Helen settles into life at the institute alongside her partner Hew, she develops a crush on an older novelist, while he is drawn to an increasingly violent protest movement.

Every day at 3:55 a.m., members of Team Movement clock in for their shift at big-box store Town Square in a small upstate New York town. Under the eyes of a self-absorbed and barely competent boss, they empty the day’s truck of merchandise, stock the shelves, and scatter before the store opens and customers arrive. Their lives follow a familiar if grueling routine, but their real problem is that Town Square doesn’t schedule them for enough hours―most of them are barely getting by, even while working second or third jobs

Danny Garvey was a 16-year-old footballing prodigy. Professional clubs clamoured to sign him, and a glittering future beckoned. And yet, his early promise remained unfulfilled, and Danny is back home in the tiny village of Barshaw to manage the struggling junior team he once played for. What’s more, he’s hiding a secret about a tragic night, 13 years earlier, that changed the course of several lives. There’s only one Danny Garvey, they once chanted...and that’s the problem.

Los Angeles burglar Junior Bender has a rule about never taking a job that pays too well: In the criminal underworld, if you’re offered more money than a job is worth, someone is going to end up dead. But he’s bending his rule this one time because he and his girlfriend, Ronnie, are in desperate need of cash to hire a kidnapper to snatch Ronnie’s two-year-old son back from her ex. The whole thing is pretty complicated and has Junior on edge.

Rocked by a terrible accident, homeless Kelly needs to escape the cold streets of Glasgow. Maybe she doesn’t believe in serendipity, but a rare moment of kindness and a lost ring conspire to call her home. As Kelly vows to reunite the ring with its owner, she must return to the small town she fled so many years ago. On her journey from Glasgow to the south-west tip of Scotland, Kelly encounters ancient pilgrim routes, hostile humans, hippies, book lovers and a friendly dog.

Tommo has just started at a new school—a training ground for the Scottish elite—when his friend Johnnie's brother is found dead in a Land Rover on a Highland farm. There's a shotgun at his feet. Nobody seems clear about what has happened, least of all Tommo. A child of the middle class, and with new independence thrust upon him, Tommo finds himself invited into fading crumbling houses. It's the early nineties and this elite is struggling for relevance. Alienated from the mainstream, and running low on inherited wealth, his peers have retreated into snobbery and fatalism.

Kody Rawlee Green is stuck in juvie. Tella “Teal Cartwheels” Carticelli is packing her bags for Rome—on the orders of her parents, who want her as far from Kody as possible. But teenage love is too strong a force for the obstacles of reality. And the highway beckons.

This is the story of a vile, cruel, disgusting man, getting exactly what he deserves. Johnny is a gangster in 60's Moon City. When Johnny picks up a delivery for his boss at an old warehouse on the edge of town, his life changes in a way you won't soon forget.

When her mother emigrates to China for work, twenty-year-old Chizu moves in with 71-year-old Ginko, an eccentric distant relative, taking a room in her ramshackle Tokyo home, with its two resident cats and the persistent rattle of passing trains. Living their lives in imperfect symmetry, they establish an uneasy alliance, stress tested by Chizu's flashes of youthful spite. As the four seasons pass, Chizu navigates a series of tedious part-time jobs and unsatisfying relationships, before eventually finding her feet and salvaging a fierce independence from her solitude.

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.

Each of the judges of the Elysian Prize for literature has a reason for accepting the job. For the chairman, MP Malcolm Craig, it is backbench boredom, media personality Jo Cross is on the hunt for a 'relevant' novel, and Oxbridge academic Vanessa Shaw is determined to discover good writing. But for Penny Feathers of the Foreign Office, it's all just getting in the way of writing her own thriller.

The hilarious BBC Radio comedy show where every sketch has been written by the public. The complete series of the ground-breaking comedy series, which called for submissions from members of the public. With over 12,000 sketches sent in from 1,500 different people, The Show What You Wrote spans such diverse comedy topics as Crime & Thriller, Kitchen Sink, Body & Soul, and "Geography", and features sketches about heaven's unexpectedly strict dress code, the Shopping Forecast, the grammar police, and some very literal highwaymen.

When hordes of people descend on the picturesque village of Nasely for the annual celebration of its most famous resident, murder mystery writer Agnes Crabbe, events take a dark turn as the festival opens with a shocking death. Each year the residents are outnumbered by crowds dressed as Crabbe’s lady detective, Millicent Cutter. The weekend is never a mild-mannered affair as fan club rivalries bubble below the surface, but tensions reach new heights when a second Crabbe devotee is found murdered. Though the police are quick to arrive on the scene, the facts are tricky to ascertain as the witnesses, suspects and victim are all dressed as Miss Cutter.

Dolores dela Cruz has been dying to spot one in the wild, and he fits the mold perfectly: strangler gloves, calculated charm, dashing good looks that give a leg up in any field ... including fields of unmarked graves. The new office temp is definitely a serial killer.