Showing results for "Life!" in Dark Humour

Seventeen-year-old Alan can’t stand rows. But, though the Second World War has ended, peace hangs by a fine thread at home: his troublesome sister Madge creeps off for night-time liaisons with a German POW; their ineffectual father – broken by the hardships of war and an unhappy marriage – can’t put food on the table despite the family’s middle-class manners; his mother pursues her escapist fantasies in romantic novels and love affairs. Obedient, faithful Alan is trapped among them all, the focus of their jibes and resentment, as inexorably the family heads towards disaster.

“Darkly funny, surprisingly tender . . . witheringly dead-on.” — Los Angeles Times Named one of the year’s best novels by: Time Salon.com Los Angeles Times NPR/Fresh Air New West Kansas City Star St. Louis Post-Dispatch A comic and heartfelt novel from the #1 New...

Brought to you by Penguin. For Rich, life is golden. He fizzes with happiness and love. But Rich has an incurable brain tumour. After Rich dies, his wife Ruth can't see how to how to keep living, and their young son Ollie is intent on working out the meaning of life. Because everything happens...

When Lucy Brennan, a Miami Beach personal-fitness trainer, disarms a gunman chasing two frightened homeless men, the police and the breaking-news cameras are not far behind and, within hours, Lucy is a media hero. The solitary eye-witness is the depressed and overweight Lena Sorensen, who...

Barry White Jr. is a self-professed man-child, and he likes it that way. He’s also a content creator for a logistics firm. No one in his Welsh village really knows what that means—least of all Barry. To add a little spice to his life, Barry places bets here and there. Then, one day, he wins big and is burdened with a mammoth sum of money. But the harder Barry tries to get rid of his winnings, the more he seems to accumulate. It’s like a real-life game of Go for Broke! Then it dawns on him. Perhaps there’s a way of turning this windfall to his advantage.

In these wonderfully funny and poignant stories, Willett’s eccentric, complex characters think and do the unconventional. Soft, euphonic women gradually grow old; weak, unhappy men confront love and their own mortality; and abominable children desperately try to grow up with grace. With a unique voice and dry humor, Willett gives us a new insight into human existence, showing us those specific moments in relationships when life suddenly becomes visible. Critically acclaimed when it was first published, Jenny and the Jaws of Life is being brought back due to popular demand.

Richard Novak is a modern-day everyman: a middle-aged divorcee trading stocks out of his home. He has done such a good job of getting his life under control that he needs no one, except his trainer, nutritionist, and housekeeper. His life has slowed almost to a standstill - until two incidents conspire to hurl him back into the world.

A darkly funny and profoundly moving new novel by award-winning author Patrick Cottrell. And who did I think I was, trying to teach the troubled youth how to write?... I would say I was Dan Moran, a Korean adoptee, single, approaching forty, once plain-in-appearance as a woman, now ugly as a man...

A Recommended Read from: Alta * Bustle * Electric Literature * Forbes * LitHub * Los Angeles Times * Kirkus * New York Times * People * Vulture An exuberant, brutally hilarious novel about a young woman’s insatiable quest to carve her own path—even if she needs to step over a few dead bodies...

Una vieja gloria del bolero y un rockero frustrado se encuentran. Dos formas de ver el mundo convergen en un proyecto tan inverosímil como su sociedad que, esperan, los llevará a las mieles de esa gloria tan escurridiza. A ratos pícaro y cínico, Dalio encontrará en el joven Poli al cómplice de su regreso a los escenarios sin importar los métodos para lograrlo. La vida alegre es la radiografía de una amistad, a la vez que un manual de supervivencia en clave narrativa; una historia que asienta la importancia de la música para paliar todos los naufragios de la vida misma.

In series 1 and 2, as his mum and wife, Mary, sit round his bedside and wonder how to wake him up, Ben’s mind is busy elsewhere. In his imagination, he lives with his two-year-old daughter, Blitz (now miraculously grown up), encounters celebrities such as Sue Lawley, Elvis Presley and Tom Paulin, relives memories from his past and gets into a compromising situation with a fellow inmate at a strangely familiar Torquay hotel. Meanwhile, an imaginary sitcom written by him, about coma patients in a hospital, plays in the background.

That someone might end up dead at the Palms School’s annual glamping trip in Santa Barbara wasn’t far-fetched. Taking city people into the woods was begging for murder. What was surprising was how far these mothers would go to cover it up.

“Wonderful. . . . Dark, funny, full of emotional intelligence and gripping from the start . . . beautifully written.”—Daily Mail The internationally bestselling author and host of The Graham Norton Show returns with a tense and darkly comic novel that casts a caustic light on the...

‘Funny, touching and wise, I loved it’ Kit de Waal, bestselling author of My Name Is Leon Wendy is lonely but coping. All nineteen-year-old Wendy wants is to drive the 255 bus around Uddingston with her regulars on board, remember to buy milk when it runs out and just to be okay. After her...

Angus Mooney is not happy—he's been murdered, cut off in the prime of his life. He feels humiliated—he's never even believed in an afterlife. (How wrong he'd been). He's confused—death has provided more questions than answers. And he desperately misses his audacious and fiery wife, Gracie, who's expecting their first child. The only upside is that Angus has found a way to see what his murderer is up to and how Gracie is faring. The downside: Gracie and his murderer are getting uncomfortably close, and a worldwide pandemic means the afterlife is about to get very crowded.

The unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of India Knight's darkly comic Comfort and Joy. Read with humour and sensitivity by Lucy Brown, the star of the hit show Primeval. It's December 23rd and Clara Dunphy is running around Oxford Street like a blue-arsed fly trying to buy presents. She...

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Mother's Milk is the fourth of Edward St Aubyn's semi-autobiographical Patrick Melrose novels, adapted for TV for Sky Atlantic and starring Benedict Cumberbatch as aristocratic addict, Patrick. This audiobook edition is read by stage and screen actor Alex...

Los personajes de Bestiaria vida van configurando el laberinto en el que vive nuestro personaje: una mujer que se enfrenta a sus propios demonios personales y que en un momento determinado hace un ejercicio de reflexión para contarnos su historia. Su objetivo no es otro que analizar por qué ha llegado a la situación en la que se encuentra. Los vínculos entre el sujeto y su entorno familiar se explican a través de personajes que, mediante analogías, son identificados con el bestiario literario.

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."

This skillfully wrought examination of character and relationships opens with macabre impact. A bland newspaper report describes the discovery of two dead women - one of them a skeleton - in a North London house. The author teases the reader toward the known, grisly ending by cutting back and forth in time and gradually constructing the complex pattern of emotions and events that define even the most mundane-seeming lives.