Showing results for "The 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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Hija de una estrella de cine narcisista y de un multimillonario, una Navidad Madison es abandonada en un internado suizo mientras sus padres se dedican a impulsar sus nuevos proyectos y a adoptar huerfanitos. Entonces Madison muere por una sobredosis y lo siguiente que sabe es que está en el Infierno rodeada de un variopinto grupo de jóvenes pecadores demasiado bueno para ser cierto: una animadora, un deportista, un empollón y un rockero punk.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Boston-born first-responder Alex Flynn is back with wry wit and still chasing emergencies in rural Vermont in this tale involving a gas line, a chainsaw, and other things that might or might not go boom and that might or might not go horrible wrong. Eavesdrop on emergency personnel as they attempt to diffuse a dicey situation in this, the first in the Trowbridge Dispatch collection of short stories.