Showing titles in Satire

For the past 13 years, as England became an increasingly unhappy and fearful place, Prince Charles has been living quietly on a bleak council estate with his wife and love of his life, Camilla. He enjoys gardening and poultry keeping while Camilla spends her days doing as little as possible. But life is about to change.

Evelyn Waugh's 1934 novel is a bitingly funny vision of aristocratic decadence in England between the wars. It tells the story of Tony Last, who, to the irritation of his wife, is inordinately obsessed with his Victorian Gothic country house and life. When Lady Brenda Last embarks on an affair with the worthless John Beaver out of boredom with her husband, she sets in motion a sequence of tragicomic disasters that reveal Waugh at his most scathing.

Marian is determined to be ordinary. She lays her head gently on the shoulder of her serious fiancé and quietly awaits marriage. But she didn't count on an inner rebellion that would rock her stable routine and her digestion. Marriage a la mode, Marian discovers, is something she literally can't stomach....

According to Kurt Vonnegut's alter ego, the old science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, a global timequake will occur on February 13, 2001, at 2:27 p.m. It will be the moment when the universe suffers a crisis of conscience: Should it go on expanding indefinitely or collapse and make another great big BANG? For its own cosmic reasons, it decides to back up a decade to 1991, giving the world a 10-year case of deja vu, making everybody and everything do exactly what they'd done during the past decade.

Emmy Award-winning actor Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad, Malcom in the Middle) follows in the exasperated footsteps of Samuel L. Jackson, giving voice to the long-suffering father whose indifferent child will just not eat in this hilarious follow-up to Adam Mansbach's international best seller, Go the F--k to Sleep.

Not everyone has to be dragged kicking and screaming through adulthood. Dave Barry will help through this process - with his hilarious takes on parenting, changing self-image, the battle of the sexes, technology, health care, celebrityhood, and even vampires!

I'm pregnant with my ex's brother's baby. The plan was to avoid anything related to my ex-boyfriend Jacob Cane by leaving my hometown of Braven Bay. But fate had other plans. I crossed paths with his older brother, Nate, in the Windy City. Nate is a former Marine and firefighter with forest green eyes and an incredible body. Nate is not only in the same city as me, he's also my neighbor. And... He doesn't like me. He holds animosity towards me from years earlier when fate first brought us together. It doesn’t stop the electricity we both feel. As we become closer, Jacob's sense of ...

Convinced of his own moral and intellectual superiority, the nameless protagonist of this debut novel is also paralyzed by self-consciousness. Yet, inspired by Stephen King’s On Writing, he decides to dedicate four hours a day to work on his own novel over the course of one summer. Only, he must also balance his creative goals with a part-time government job and looking after his girlfriend’s possibly brain-damaged Pomeranian dog.

Trollope's classic novel features Reverend Septimus Harding, the elderly warden of the Barchester alms-house. However, for a man devoting himself to helping the poor, Reverend Harding's salary is rather lucrative. Aiming to ease his conscience and quiet his neighbors' whispers, he decides to divest himself of all the income he earns at the alms-house. But this decision causes unforeseen complications. The first of his Barsetshire series, this novel provides a detailed, gently satirical portrayal of 19th century British life.

“An amazing serial story of Black genius against the world” is how Black Empire was promoted upon its original publication as a serial in The Pittsburgh Courier from 1936 to 1938. It tells the electrifying tale of Dr. Henry Belsidus, a Black scientific genius desperate to free his people from the crushing tyranny of racism. To do so, he concocts a plot to enlist a crew of Black intellectuals to help him take over the world, cultivating a global network to reclaim Africa from imperial powers and punish Europe and America for white supremacy.

The time is the early '80s. The characters go to the same schools and eat at the same restaurants. Their voices enfold us as seamlessly as those of DJs heard over a car radio. They have sex with the same boys and girls and buy from the same dealers. In short, they are connected in the only way people can be in that city.

Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom. Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette's intensifying allergy to Seattle - and people in general - has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands.

Have you ever wished you could live in an earlier, more romantic era? Ladies, welcome to the 19th century, where there's arsenic in your face cream, a pot of cold pee sits under your bed, and all of your underwear is crotchless. (Why? Shush, dear. A lady doesn't question.) Unmentionable is your hilarious, scandalously honest (yet never crass) guide to the secrets of Victorian womanhood.

Fox 8 has always been known as the daydreamer in his pack, the one his fellow foxes regarded with a knowing snort and a roll of the eyes. That is, until Fox 8 develops a unique skill: He teaches himself to speak Yuman by hiding in the bushes outside a house and listening to children’s bedtime stories. The power of language fuels his abundant curiosity about people - even after danjer arrives in the form of a new shopping mall that cuts off his food supply, sending Fox 8 on a harrowing quest to help save his pack.

Funny and doom-drenched, The Employees chronicles the fate of the Six-Thousand Ship. The human and humanoid crew members complain about their daily tasks in a series of staff reports and memos. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew becomes strangely and deeply attached to them, even as tensions boil toward mutiny, especially among the humanoids.

This is the tale of the happy but ill-fated Candide and his progressive disillusionment with the idea that we live in the best of all possible worlds. His tutor, Dr. Pangloss, embodies this philosophy of good cheer, even in the face of ever more absurd misfortunes. Luckily, Candide's other companions provide an over-supply of good sense.

Candide, the illegitimate nephew of a German baron and student of eternal optimist Pangloss, is living a simple and sheltered life in "the best of all possible worlds." But when Candide falls in love with the wrong woman, his uncle's young daughter, he is exiled from the baron's castle and suffers great tragedy and catastrophe, which leaves him disillusioned and questioning the goodness of the universe.

Bill (Lord) Rowcester was well and truly in the gumbo. With the benefit of hindsight he could see that setting himself up as a Silver Ring bookie might not have been his smartest move ever. Particularly when being down on his dibbs threatens his oncoming nuptials with the sterling Jill Wyvern. Lucky for Bill he had the land-lease of Jeeves. Lucky indeed that the fish-fed mastermind's formidable genius was at liberty to take a header into such teasers as borrowing the stellar Mrs. Spottsworth's pendent for an hour or three.

A classic guide to tricks and tactics for winning arguments, with commentary on the use of and defense against each tactic. The best summary of this audiobook is "being right doesn’t mean you’re gonna win, and this is why". It’s the ultimate guide to spotting the many different kinds of bull people pull in order to win over the crowd, rather than argue the point at hand. There’s very few of them that don’t immediately bring examples to mind, and having it laid out clearly like this is the perfect armour to stop people derailing you.

Steven Erikson has taken his lifelong passion for Star Trek and transformed it into a smart, inventive, and hugely entertaining spoof on the whole overblown mankind-exploring-space-for-the-good-of-all-species-but-trashing-stuff-with-a-lot-of-high-tech-gadgets-along-the-way adventure. The result is a novel that deftly parodies the genre while also paying fond homage to it.