Showing titles in Dark Humour

Ramesh Kumar grew up deprived and unloved, working on his father's tea stall in the Old City of Delhi. Now, brilliant but poor, he makes a lucrative living taking tests for the sons of India's elite. When one of his clients, the sweet but hapless 18-year-old Rudi Saxena, places first in the All Indias, the national university entrance exams, Ramesh sees an unmissable opportunity. Cashing in on Rudi's newfound celebrity, all goes well for both boys for a while. But Rudi's role on a game show leads to unexpected love, blackmail and finally, a dangerous kidnapping.

It's Valentine's Day, and Ellie Knight finds herself eating Nutella in the bar stock after a no-show date. But single doesn't have to be the loneliest number, does it? She goes back home to her flatshare and weird flatmates. It's okay there's black mould everywhere, right? With a hangover from hell, she goes to the office job she thought she would have quit by now. Doesn't everyone hate their job? Maybe Ellie isn't following the official life plan, but perfect is overrated.

Schweinskopf al dente: Rita Falks dritter niederbayerischer Provinzkrimi als Hörschmaus. Franz Eberhofer ermittelt wieder. Diesmal schon als Kommissar, wobei er uns gleich zu Beginn hören lässt, was er über seine "miese erbsengrüne Uniform" denkt, die so gar nicht zu seinem neuen silbernen Stern passen will...

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.

It's New Year's Eve, the holiday of forced fellowship, mandatory fun, and paper hats. While dining out with her husband and their friends, Kirshenbaum's protagonist - an acerbic, mordantly witty, and clinically depressed writer - fully unravels. Propelled by stand-up comic timing and rife with pinpoint insights, Kirshenbaum examines what it means to be unloved and loved, to succeed and fail, to be at once impervious and raw. Rabbits for Food shows how art can lead us out of - or into - the depths of disconsolate loneliness and piercing grief.

The Skelf women are recovering from the cataclysmic events that nearly claimed their lives. Their funeral-director and private-investigation businesses are back on track, and their cases are as perplexing as ever. Matriarch Dorothy looks into a suspicious fire at a travellers' site, and takes a grieving, homeless man under her wing. Daughter Jenny is searching for her missing sister-in-law, who disappeared in tragic circumstances, while granddaughter Hannah is asked to investigate increasingly dangerous conspiracy theorists targeting a retired female astronaut...putting her own life at risk.

New mother Dani has a lot going on. She's just moved back to her hometown, where her father was once known as the Garbage King; she's fed up of not being a manicure-sporting, perfectly coiffed Normal Woman; and most of all, she's worried that her seemingly healthy husband, Clark, will drop dead, leaving her and her new baby Lotte destitute. And then Dani discovers The Temple. Ostensibly a yoga center, The Temple and its guardian, Renata, are committed to helping people reach their full potential. And if that sometimes requires sex work, so be it.

In this "bittersweet and utterly beguiling novel" (Publishers Weekly) each of the MacKenzie family tells their stories in nine, wildly opposed points of view. Starting at a family reunion, three generations of the MacKenzies face off against each other. They discover that terrorism is as intimate as one's own family. Selected as a New York Times "Notable Book of the Year", Duck and Cover is a "wicked black comedy" of a family who fights their wars "on the home front."

Elsa is struggling. Her formative, exhilarating relationship – with an older couple – has abruptly ended, leaving her depressed and directionless in her childhood bedroom. In the relationship’s wake, Elsa scrolls aimlessly through the internet in search of meaning. Faithfully, her screen provides a new obsession: a charismatic young actor whose latest feature is a gay love story that illuminates Elsa’s crisis. And then, as if she had conjured him, the actor arrives in her hometown, with an entourage of fellow actors, writers, and directors, for the annual theatre festival.

The petty, vicious gods demand that Bib the sorcerer lure his friend, the young king, into a losing war. Bib thinks he’s clever enough to arrange things so that the king is defeated yet keeps his throne - and his head. But the king won’t listen until Bib crushes some traitors for him. Faced with rebellious nobles, mystical killers, and allies he can’t control, Bib finds that cleverness needs a sword and some vicious magic to back it up. Because if he fails, the gods have torture, death, and even destruction beyond death waiting for him. They may even point and laugh.

Maya's been able to get by in New York on her wits and a dead-end bookstore job for years, but when her husband leaves her and her favorite professor ends their affair, her barely-calibrated life descends into chaos, and she has to make some choices. Maya's struggle to be alone, to be a woman, and to be thoughtful and imperfect and alive in a world that doesn't really care what happens to her is rendered with dead-eyed clarity and unnerving charm. This book takes every tired trope about addiction and recovery, "likeable" characters, and redemption narratives and blows them to pieces.

In search of the ferocious truth, some would call trying to channel the spirit of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson a fool’s errand. But these are desperate times. So settle in for this trilogy of uppers, downers, screamers, laughers from John Bruni (Tales of Questionable Taste), Kent Hill (Hercules with a Shotgun) and Kevin Candela (Weedeaters: The Complete Acropalypse) as they bring you just what the doctor ordered.

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.

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.

At 18, Emma Kenward runs away from her dull Sloane home to try her luck as a painter in Tuscany. Waspish, idealistic and far too clever for her own good, she is at the awkward age when women choose their futures - and their identities.

The Sarah Book is Scott McClanahan's continuation of the semi-autobiographical portrait he's been writing over the years about his life in West Virginia. This one is his portrait of love.

Eliot Nailles loves his wife and son to distraction; his Bullet Park neighbour, Paul Hammer, is a bastard named after a common household tool. The pair become fatefully linked by the mysterious binding power of their names.

Dying is easy. It’s the Apocalypse that’s hard. Before the outside world devolved into a fiery pit of hell, Noel and Julia hosted a successful and wonderfully pretentious community radio show. Now their basement studio is their survival bunker, and they find themselves completely alone. With no escape and nothing left except an increasingly eclectic selection of questionable records, Noel and Julia proudly debut their new show: Is Anyone Alive Out There?. How could they create a stellar show when they really just need to survive?

It's crass gun porn filled with fanboy pandering action movie references. Do you like action movies? Do you like dark, edgy, hard-boiled heroes? Do you like fully automatic weapons blasting guys' heads off? How about product endorsements that are awkwardly placed between depictions of intense violence? Yeah? Then this book is for you!

The orcs are thirsty. And so are Captain Frank Gerber's swords, but apparently, you can't murder your customers. Stuck with a nightclub after a job gone wrong, Frank has to figure out how to rebuild something he never even wanted. That's just the first of his problems. Frank's blades will have a taste of blood again, but first, he has to party with orcs, barter with gnomes, drink with dwarves, and make shady deals with the scum of Sankta Varath, the greatest city in all of Steelheart Kingdom. And that's just the first week.