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...

Jonathan e Barbara Rose hanno all'apparenza un matrimonio perfetto: una villa di lusso piena di oggetti di antiquariato, due carriere invidiabili, figli deliziosi e una Ferrari fiammante in garage. Una vita da sogno, insomma, finché Jonathan non viene colpito da un improvviso malore e la facciata sfavillante del loro rapporto comincia a sgretolarsi. Dopo diciotto anni insieme, Barbara capisce di non amare più suo marito e decide di chiedere il divorzio. Jonathan non si oppone, ma nessuno dei due è disposto a lasciare la casa, simbolo del loro successo e, adesso, della loro rovina.

Lenny Marks is excellent at not having a life. She bikes home from work at exactly 4pm each day, buys the same groceries for the same meals every week, and owns thirty-six copies of The Hobbit (currently arranged by height). The closest thing she has to a friendship is playing Scrabble against an imaginary Monica Gellar while watching Friends reruns. And Lenny Marks is very, very good at not remembering what happened the day her mother and stepfather disappeared when she was still a child. The day a voice in the back of her mind started whispering, You did this.

This is a satellite-dish-free zone of tall houses, standing shoulder to shoulder with big front doors, five floors apiece. You could almost be in Kensington. This is where the actors, writers and media types live, where small children wearing smart uniforms and shoes in the shape of lightbulbs get ferried every day to schools that are not local. Some people are luckier than others; fortune smiles on some and gobs on the rest. Jo Metcalf smokes and spies on the smug Cunninghams down the street as they play their bile-inducing game of happy families.

Serge A. Storms gives condo living a try in this latest acid-splashed Florida crime caper from the “insanely funny” (New York Times Book Review) Tim Dorsey. Serge A. Storms and his permanently baked sidekick, Coleman, have decided to pump the brakes and live on island time. After years of...

Rebecca is a wife, mother and the author of an unmanageable number of to do lists. Her attempts to coerce her life into something she has any hope of controlling are failing. Her family can’t manage without her but she’s starting to think they should. So she makes a decision. Only it doesn’t quite go to plan. Rebecca finds herself in therapy with a doctor poking around in her brain, asking questions about her childhood. She wants to get better but that means telling someone how she feels. How she really feels. She’s gone to pieces. Can she put herself back together?

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.

'We looked like the perfect young family, something out of a magazine, in shades of marshmallow pink....' A photograph. The father smiling beside his new car, the mother pregnant and radiant, the little girl placing cuddly toys in the cot for her new baby brother. All we see is the happiness. 'We don't see my mother. We don't see the lies.' But behind every picture there is a story. And behind that story, there are others. Every family has its secrets.

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.

At times funny, at other times sad, and more than often a mixture of the two, Giving Up by Mike Steeves is a deeply felt account of what goes on in the inner sanctum of the modern couple's apartment.

All Georgie Turner wants is to keep her family together. But with her daughter growing up fast, her sister married to a man Georgie hates, and their aging aunt getting more and more outrageous, nothing’s simple. So when her brother-in-law makes his biggest mistake yet, Georgie sees the chance to reunite the ladies in her life. And after a little persuasion, three generations of Turner women head off on a very unusual road trip. Georgie’s confident that some sun, sea and a bottle or two of prosecco will make this an adventure they’ll never forget. What could possibly go wrong?

In Banshee, Samantha Baxter - wife, mother, poetry professor - learns she has breast cancer and then ruins her own life. Tumbling through a catastrophic midlife crisis, she gives herself permission to partake in behaviors she's observed in her male colleagues, including having an affair with a student her daughter's age, ranting at board meetings, and telling her poetry students what she really thinks of their work. Underneath biting, witty narration lurks a childish, confused, and unrealized adult woman hell-bent on destroying her relationships and professional life.

When Rita McCall discovers her husband’s affair, there isn’t a lick of surprise—not a single tear or broken heart. Just a wife and mother who’s over it and ready to watch her twenty-three-year marriage go up in flames. Sticking close, thick as thieves since childhood, Rita’s unfailingly loyal cousins Jemel and Sharae become her lifeline. They stand beside her as she contemplates a new career and navigates the murky waters of being a preacher’s daughter disgraced by scandal.

Stevie, a recovering alcoholic and kitchen manager of Chappy’s, a small-chain restaurant, is frantically trying to prevent the people around her from going supernova: her PTSD-suffering veteran son, her uproariously demented parents, the polyglot eccentrics who work in her kitchen, the blind geriatric dog she inherits, and a damaged 5-year-old who landed on her doorstep and might just be her granddaughter. In the tight grip of new corporate owners, Stevie battles corporate’s “restructuring” to save her kitchen.

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."

Nina does not have a drinking problem. She likes a drink, sure. But what 17-year-old doesn't? Nina's mum isn't so sure. But she's busy with her new husband and five-year-old Katie. Nina's almost an adult, after all. And if Nina sometimes wakes up with little memory of what happened the night before, then her friends are all too happy to fill in the blanks. Nina's drunken exploits are the stuff of college legend. But then one dark Sunday morning, even her friends can't help piece together Saturday night.

Caroline Townsend is a nightmare for her children. The former actress and current alcoholic hits her nadir on Christmas Eve. Her five young children hope for a Christmas celebration. Instead, they get a fight with their mother, who's absolutely plastered and fresh off yet another failed relationship. After lashing out at her children, Caroline passes out under the bent and mangled Christmas tree. For the Townsend children, this proves to be a rare opportunity - a chance to set things right with their mother. Together, they concoct an elaborate ruse designed to teach her a lesson, once and for all.

Frazzled mum Alice Ray likes to think she’s on top everything - she has four bags-for-life in the boot of her car for heaven's sake. But after spectacularly embarrassing herself at work, she finally gives in to her sister’s pleas to take a much-needed break. But this is not the luxury spa holiday Alice hoped for - instead, she finds herself in Denmark, in the middle of nowhere, on a ‘How to be a Viking’ getaway. Can the two sisters finally learn to get along, or will learning to embrace their inner warriors just make them better at fighting?