Showing results for "The English Man" in Dark Humour

Flann O'Brien's most popular and surrealistic novel concerns an imaginary, hellish village police force and a local murder.

Weird, satirical, and very funny, its popularity has suddenly increased with the mention of the novel in the TV series Lost.

A successful entrepreneur in the mushroom industry, Jaakko Kaunismaa is a man in his prime. At just 37 years of age, he is shocked when his doctor tells him that he's dying. What is more, the cause is discovered to be prolonged exposure to toxins; in other words, someone has slowly but surely been poisoning him. Determined to find out who wants him dead, Jaakko embarks on a suspenseful roller-coaster journey full of unusual characters, bizarre situations and unexpected twists.

A picaresque tale of how one person's actions can have far-reaching—even global—consequences, from the author of the bestselling novel The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared In a tiny shack in the largest township in South Africa, Nombeko Mayeki is born. Poor and...

A young couple's toxic Instagram crush spins out of control and unleashes a sinister creature in this twisted, viciously funny, "bananas good" story (Carmen Maria Machado). "Um, holy shit...This novel will be the most fun you'll have this summer." —Emily Temple, Literary Hub Remy and Alicia, a...

Good does not exist. There is only the ever-swirling chaos of evil lurking just beyond the veil of our perception waiting to strike arbitrarily without purpose or reason. When evil throws its wiry tentacles out into our world leaving an inky black sludge of death, sadness, and destruction in their wake it's done not out of maliciousness but at random with no forethought, no agenda.

Set at the fag-end of the 60s at the moment when Swinging London is starting to take on a darker hue in the wake of Charles Manson's murders, and framed as a novel within a novel published by a seedy Piccadilly-based publisher of pulp fiction, Man-Eating Typewriter is a homage to the great oulipo experiments in fiction. It is the story of a psychopath called Raymond Novak and his untimely demise told entirely in 'polari' - a language developed and used mainly amongst the metropolitan homosexual community in the time when being gay was still a criminal offence.

The very liberal Kirks are throwing a party. For Howard Kirk, liberal sociology lecturer whose deluded sense of heroism has him moving seductively around the university campus, the net must be perfectly cast: ‘if you want to have something that’s genuinely unstructured, you have to plan it carefully.’ Kirk embodies the contradictions of the era’s intellectual and political climate. As he navigates complex relationships with his wife, his students and his colleagues, he pursues personal and professional agendas under the guise of progressive thought.

A New York Times Book Review and Washington Post ""Top-10 Thriller of the Year"" A New Yorker, Vogue, Esquire, Elle, and Bookshop.org ""Best Book of the Year' Conor O’Toole has never been anywhere like Cutters Neck, a gated community near Cape Cod. It’s a sweet deal for the summer: in...

Specially adapted for audio by the author. Fleabag meets I Am Legend in this extraordinary novel of one woman's survival in the face of the end of the world. Who will she be now that she is completely alone? THE END OF EVERYTHING WAS HER BEGINNING It's November 2022. The human race has been...

Spreading democracy takes more than cutting-edge military hardware. Winning the hearts and minds of a troubled nation is a special mission we give to bewildered young soldiers who can’t speak the native language, don’t know the customs, can’t tell friends from enemies, and–in this...

The story of a father and son - and is it true, as Wordsworth claimed, that "the child is father of the man" or can one's character actually change as one grows older?

A vicar is disbelieving when two teenagers in his parish claim to have been given a message by the archangel Gabriel, but gradually changes his mind and decides he must do something about it.

At turns funny and strangely sobering, this “found memoir” is a picaresque tale of inspired, heroic deceit, incompetence, and - just possibly - triumph. Follow the flailing escapades of maverick music manager Campbell Ouiniette at the Calgary Folk Festival, as he leaves a trail of empty liquor bottles, cigarette butts, bruised egos, and obliterated relationships behind him. His top headlining act has abandoned him for the Big Time. In a fit of self-delusion or pure genius (or perhaps a bit of both), Ouiniette devises an intricate scam....

Swallow the Ghost traces the impact of a violent event on three different lives, each interconnected story further complicating the truth. Things are going well for Jane Murphy, or so it seems. She’s making it in New York, a sort of wunderkind at the social media marketing startup where she...

Take the ride of a lifetime with this mother/son, crime/revenge thriller James Patterson praises as “audacious, addictive, highly entertaining.” ​ Eighteen-year-old aspiring comic Joey Rossi just found out his boyfriend has been cheating on him for the past ten months. But what did he...

This comic novel, told in epistolary fashion as a sequence of exchanged letters, presents pornographer "Guy LaDouche" retreating to the wilderness with the hope of solitude and concentration to write his next book under a looming deadline. Instead of peace, he finds harassment and distraction from his publisher, his old girlfriend, and an angry father convinced that LaDouche's last novel, featuring a genuine nymphomaniac, was based on the man's daughter.

After 15 years of humiliation, Timothy is coming out of the closet to murder his insensitive and domineering wife, Marcia. The Man in the Cupboard is a sad and darkly funny tale of isolation – in both life and dreams. Winner of the 1998 Singapore Literature Prize Merit Award...

A collection of interlinked tales of crime and retribution laced with dark humour, set around the festive season – from the No. 1 bestseller Stuart MacBride On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me… Twelve days, twelve stories. Meet Fat Billy Partridge, possibly the worst...