Showing titles in Satire

Bruce Chatwin's best-selling novel traces the fortunes of the enigmatic and unconventional hero, Kaspar Utz. Despite the restrictions of Cold War Czechoslovakia, Utz asserts his individuality through his devotion to his precious collection of Meissen porcelain. Although Utz is permitted to leave the country each year, and considers defecting each time, he is not allowed to take his porcelain with him and so he always returns to his Czech home, a prisoner both of the Communist state and of his collection.

Nate Turner has a nice life. He has a steady job as a driving examiner and lives with his wife, Sinead, and son, Flynn, in a lovely house in a good part of town. Yes, it’s a very nice life. Until one morning Nate comes downstairs to find Sinead gone and a note lying on the kitchen table, listing all the many things that Nate does wrong - or doesn’t do at all.

The adventure continues. Tim and the C and C gang face their most difficult challenges yet. Horses die. Eyeballs are eaten. People are urinated on. A god is born.

Trust Fall isn't your typical 9-to-5 comedy. Created by Claire Friedman and featuring a cast that reads like a humor hall of fame—Colin Jost, Wanda Sykes, Chris Parnell, Neil Patrick Harris, Cecily Strong, and more—this is a sidesplitting adventure in the corporate circus.

Part of Wodehouse Blandings series. When a valuable scarab belonging to an American millionaire is absent-mindedly stolen by Lord Emsworth, young writers Ashe Marson and Joan Valentine are tasked with infiltrating Blandings Castle to retrieve it. Meanwhile, vacuous Freddie Threepwood worries that some compromising letters may scupper his engagement to the millionaire's daughter.

No longer in master Bertie Wooster’s employ, Jeeves is engaged with a new employer, Lord "Chuffy" Chuffnell, an old friend of Bertie’s. True to form, thus follows a supreme comedy of errors which is guaranteed to raise many a chortle, as Wooster travels to one of Chuffy’s cottages in Dorset to carry on his banjolele practice in (dubious) peace.

They’ve taken everything from him. Now Jerry and Chewy are headed to Niagara Falls to take out the wasteland’s greatest villain once and for all. But The Librarian isn’t the only one looking for revenge. Several other post-apocalyptic nomadic warriors have experienced Invcitus’ horrors firsthand and are in town to find vengeance. The Bookkeepers have lived under the tyrant’s iron fist for far too long. They’re well informed, organized, and ready to strike.

Pregnant and secretly married, Cheryl Anway scribbles what becomes her last will and testament on a school binder shortly before a rampaging trio of misfit classmates gun her down in a high school cafeteria. For a handful of people still reeling from that horrific day, life remains derailed.

Gorm Ingerson knows the king is a fink. With the land’s insidious ruler hell-bent on his destruction, the axe-wielding Dwarf berserker is desperate to beat him to the punch. But when he discovers the rotten regent’s claim of a town razed by the world’s richest dragon is false, the gruff adventurer fears there’s more than a personal grudge at stake.

As intricate as a house of mirrors, Nabokov’s last novel is an ironic play on the Janus-like relationship between fiction and reality. It is the autobiography of the eminent Russian-American author Vadim Vadimovich N. (b. 1899), whose life bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, though the two are not to be confused (?).

The year is 1969. In a housing project in south Brooklyn, a shambling old church deacon called Sportscoat shoots - for no apparent reason - the local drug-dealer who used to be part of the church's baseball team. The repercussions of that moment draw in the whole community, from Sportscoat's best friend - Hot Sausage - to the local Italian mobsters, the police (corrupt and otherwise), and the stalwart ladies of the Five Ends Baptist Church.

The year is 2108, and the North American Commonwealth is bursting at the seams. For welfare rats like Andrew Grayson, there are only two ways out of the crime-ridden and filthy welfare tenements: You can hope to win the lottery and draw a ticket on a colony ship settling off-world...or you can join the service. With the colony lottery a pipe dream, Andrew chooses to enlist in the armed forces for a shot at real food, a retirement bonus, and maybe a ticket off Earth.

Jack Gladney is the creator and chairman of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill. This is the story of his absurd life - a life that is going well enough until a chemical spill from a rail car releases an Airborne Toxic Event, and Jack is forced to confront his biggest fear: his own mortality. White Noise is an effortless combination of social satire and metaphysical dilemma in which Don DeLillo exposes our rampant consumerism, media saturation and novelty intellectualism.

Leinster House had been burned to the ground. All that was left was a smouldering ruin and the blackened remains of an Irish flag. The old man was trying to pin the blame on Brussels, but I knew the actual truth? Unfortunately, Sorcha was too angry with me for having sex with our daughter's Irish teacher to listen. But I had, like, other irons in the—pardon the pun—fire. I'd just become Head Coach of the Ireland rugby team—albeit, women. The country might well have been focked. But very soon, we had everyone believing in fairy tales again.

Palahniuk’s fashion-model protagonist has it all - boyfriend, career, loyal best friend - until an accident destroys her face, her ability to speak, and her self-esteem. Enter Brandy Alexander, Queen Supreme, one operation away from becoming a bona fide woman.

Susan Frobisher and Julie Wickham are turning 60. They live in a small Dorset town and have been friends since school. On the surface Susan has it all - a lovely house and a long marriage to accountant Barry. Life has not been so kind to Julie, but now, with several failed businesses and bad relationships behind her, she has found stability: living in a council flat and working in an old people's home.

When Shadeys Bank loses another CEO to a scandal, they are desperate to show they’ve reformed. Who better to present their redemption than a country Vicar? Reverend Tom Goodman is ousted from his job as a country Vicar for allowing a homeless family to stay in the church hall. Meanwhile, a major bank is trying to rescue its image after the latest in a long string of financial scandals. It seems like the perfect match, and Goodman is hastily appointed as the bank’s new CEO.

Twenty-nine-year-old PhD student Ingrid Yang is desperate to finish her dissertation on the late canonical poet Xiao-Wen Chou and never read about ‘Chinese-y’ things again. When she accidentally stumbles upon a strange and curious note in the Chou archives, she convinces herself it’s her ticket out of academic hell. But Ingrid’s in much deeper than she thinks. Her clumsy exploits to unravel the note’s message lead to an explosive discovery, one that upends her entire life and the lives of those around her.

Kenneth Horne, Kenneth Williams, Betty Marsden and Hugh Paddick star in 20 episodes of the anarchic 1960s radio comedy. Round the Horne arrived on BBC radio in 1965, bringing laughter to Sunday lunchtimes throughout the land. It carved a niche in the history of broadcast comedy, a sketch show which prodded the boundaries of propriety and innuendo.

Deadeye Dick is Kurt Vonnegut's funny, chillingly satirical look at the death of innocence. Amid a true Vonnegutian host of horrors - a double murder, a fatal dose of radioactivity, a decapitation, an annihilation of a city by a neutron bomb - Rudy Waltz, aka Deadeye Dick, takes us along on a zany search for absolution and happiness. Here is a tale of crime and punishment that makes us rethink what we believe...and who we say we are.