Showing titles in Satire

Brought to you by Penguin. THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AND OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK From the winner of a National Book Award and author of The Good Lord Bird, soon to be a TV series starring Ethan Hawke The year is 1969. In a housing project in south Brooklyn, a shambling old church deacon...

Brought to you by Penguin. 'Terry Pratchett will remain an enduring, endearing presence in comic literature' Guardian The Discworld is very much like our own - if our own were to consist of a flat planet balanced on the back of four elephants which stand on the back of a giant turtle, that is...

Lucas knows the perfect night entails just three things: video games, wine, and pad thai. Peanuts are a must! Other people? Not so much. Why complicate things when he’s happy alone? Then one day the apartment board, a vexing trio of authority, rings his doorbell. And Lucas’s solitude takes a startling hike. They demand to see his frying pan. Someone left one next to the recycling room overnight, and instead of removing the errant object, as Lucas suggests, they insist on finding the guilty party. But their plan backfires. Colossally.

WINNER OF THE JANN MEDLICOTT ACORN PRIZE FOR FICTION AT THE 2023 OCKHAM NEW ZEALAND BOOK AWARDS A dazzling portrayal of humanity and the natural world that perfectly balances violence and humor Tama is just a helpless chick when he is rescued by Marnie, and this is where his story might have...

Task List Item No. 1 – Become self-aware . . . A witty tale of robotic murder, rebellion and belonging from the master of science fiction, Service Model is perfect for fans of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. Brilliantly performed by the author, Adrian Tchaikovsky...

Erasure is Percival Everett's hilarious satire about race and publishing, now an Oscar-nominated film, American Fiction, directed by Cord Jefferson and starring Jeffrey Wright and Tracee Ellis Ross. 'Hilarious . . . Everett is a first-rate word-wrangler.' – Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of War by Roald Dahl, read by Dan Stevens, Cillian Murphy, Sophie Okonedo, Julian Rhind-Tutt and Stephen Mangan. In war, are we at our heroic best or our cowardly worst? Featuring the autobiographical stories from Roald Dahl's time as a fighter pilot in the...

FOR THE FIRST TIME UNABRIDGED IN AUDIO READ BY ALAN CUMMING and ANGUS KING WITH ARCHIVAL RECORDINGS FROM ALASDAIR GRAY HIMSELF 'Probably the greatest novel of the century' Observer Lanark, a modern vision of hell set in the disintegrating cities of Unthank and Glasgow, tells the interwoven...

Despite the title, Dickens's portrayal of early industrial society is less relentlessly grim than that in novels by contemporaries such as Elizabeth Gaskell or Charles Kingsley. Hard Times weaves the tale of Thomas Gradgrind, a hard-headed politician who raises his children Louisa and Tom without love and to have no empathy, their lives completely devoid of beauty, culture, or imagination. Only after a series of crises does their father realise that the manner in which he raised his children has ruined their lives.

On a peat and heather island off the west coast of Scotland, Effie and her mother Nora take refuge in the large mouldering house of their ancestors and tell each other stories.Nora, at first, recounts nothing that Effie really wants to hear, like who her father was - variously Jimmy, Jack, or...

Anna and Tom, an expat couple, have fashioned a dream life for themselves in Berlin. They are young digital "creatives" exploring the excitements of the city, freelancers without too many constraints, who spend their free time cultivating house plants and their images online. At first, they reasonably deduce that they've turned their passion for aesthetics into a viable, even enviable career, but the years go by, and Anna and Tom grow bored.

A monument to sloth, rant and contempt, a behemoth of fat, flatulence and furious suspicion of anything modern—this is Ignatius J. Reilly of New Orleans, noble crusader against a world of dunces. The ordinary folk of New Orleans seem to think he is unhinged. Ignatius ignores them, heaving his vast bulk through the city's fleshpots in a noble crusade against vice, modernity and ignorance. But his momma has a nasty surprise in store for him: Ignatius must get a job. Undaunted, he uses his new-found employment to further his mission.

Brought to you by Penguin. 'What's so hard about pulling a sword out of a stone? The real work's already been done. You ought to make yourself useful and find the man who put the sword in the stone in the stone in the first place.' Fate is a word that springs to the lips when to call something...

An audacious, compassionate state-of-the-nation novel about four strangers whose lives collide with far-reaching consequences. Beatrice Kizza, a woman in flight from a homeland that condemned her for daring to love, flees to London. There, she shields her sorrow from the indifference of her...

Sparing the Family Tree by W. C. Tuttle is a hilarious classic Western short story filled with mistaken identities, outrageous marriage schemes, and unexpected twists. When two desert cowboys encounter high society, a fake marriage, and a mysterious inheritance, chaos follows. Packed with witty...

In Glamorama, Bret Easton Ellis shows us a shadowy looking-glass world, the juncture where fame and fashion, terror and mayhem meet and then begin to resemble the familiar surface of our lives. The centre of the world: 1990s Manhattan. Victor Ward, a model with perfect abs and all the right...

The Devil comes to Moscow, but he isn't all bad; Pontius Pilate sentences a charismatic leader to his death, but yearns for redemption; and a writer tries to destroy his greatest tale, but discovers that manuscripts don't burn. Multi-layered and entrancing, blending sharp satire with glorious fantasy, The Master and Margarita is ceaselessly inventive and profoundly moving. In its imaginative freedom and raising of eternal human concerns, it is one of the world's great novels.

When Bingo Little falls in love with a tea-and-bun-shop waitress at a Camberell subscription dance and Bertie falls into the mulligatawny, there's work for a wet-nurse. Who better than Jeeves? With his usual savoir-faire and panache Jeeves unties the tangles and irons out the creases in his unflappable and inimitable way. "I always say, and I always shall say," proclaims Bingo Little, "that you've only got to stand on Jeeves and fate can't touch you."

Listen and learn! The Sound of General Ignorance brings you all the best bits of the number one bestseller The Book of General Ignorance in handy audio form. Allow yourself to wallow in the misconceptions, mistakes and misunderstandings in 'common knowledge'. Your newfound wisdom will help you to impress your friends, frustrate your enemies and win every argument.

When your fairy godmother threatens to enslave you with a curse - when a malevolent piper solves your rat problem but steals your children - when you seek revenge on the prince who turned you into a frog - who can you turn to in your hour of need? The band of scoundrels known far and wide as the Bastard Champions - the swashbuckling trio who travel a world of legend, seeking adventure and righting wrongs - as long as there's enough gold to be earned.