Historical Humor

LOVE, DISHONOR, MARRY, DIE, CHERISH, PERISH leaps cities and decades as Rakoff sings the song of an America whose freedoms can be intoxicating, or brutal. The characters' lives are linked to each other by acts of generosity or cruelty.

Due to financial hardships at Tawcester Towers, the Dowager Duchess has decreed that the only way the family fortunes can be restored is to marry Blotto off...to an American! Reluctantly, Blotto, together with Twinks and his trusty chauffeur Corky Froggett set sail.

Athens, 460 B.C. Life's tough for Nicolaos, sole investigating agent in Athens. His girlfriend's left him and his boss wants to fire him. But when an Athenian official is murdered, Pericles has no choice but to put Nico on the job. The case takes Nico, with a beautiful slave girl, to the land of Ionia within the Persian Empire. The Persians will execute him on the spot if they think he's a spy.

Undaunted by a threatening storm, Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pemberley insists he must deliver his letter to Miss Elizabeth Bennet - then tragedy strikes. Riddled with guilt, Elizabeth comes to the aid of the comatose Mr. Darcy and stays by his side until he regains consciousness. She soon learns that although Mr. Darcy has awoken, he has not returned to himself. And with no memory of his first disastrous proposal, he has concluded that there is nothing he wants more than to propose to Miss Elizabeth.

What if the history of the transatlantic slave trade had been reversed and Africans had enslaved Europeans? How would that have changed the ways that people justified their inhuman behavior? How would it inform our cultural attitudes and the insidious racism that still lingers today? We see this tragicomic world turned upside down through the eyes of Doris, an Englishwoman enslaved and taken to the New World, movingly recounting experiences of tremendous hardship and the dreams of the people she has left behind, all while journeying toward an escape into freedom.

Delphine Delacroix has lived the life of bird in a gilded cage, kept in a stately home with only her cold autocratic mother for company. At her mother’s death, she finds herself to be a wealthy woman and comes to London to be fretted over by her three maternal aunts determined to have her marry well. But Delphine feels she is once more having to hand herself over to another’s will and seeks to be the mistress of her own destiny.

Set in the time of Charlemagne and narrated by a nun with her own secrets to keep, The Nonexistent Knight tells the story of Agilulf, a gleaming white suit of armor with nothing inside it. A challenge to his honor sends Agilulf on a search through France, England, and North Africa to confirm the chastity of a virgin he saved from rape years earlier.

Dorothy Hare, the dutiful daughter of a rector in Suffolk, spends her days performing good works and cultivating good thoughts, pricking her arm with a pin when a bad thought arises. She does her best to reconcile her father’s fanciful view of his position in the world with such realities as the butcher’s bill. But even Dorothy’s strength has its limits, and one night, as she works feverishly on costumes for the church-school play, she blacks out. When she comes to, she finds herself on a London street, clad in a sleazy dress and unaware of her identity.

When Noel Bostock - aged 10, no family - is evacuated from London to escape the Nazi bombardment, he lands in a suburb northwest of the city with Vera Sedge - a 36-year-old widow drowning in debts and dependents. Always desperate for money, she's unscrupulous about how she gets it.

Part of a six-instalment comic book series, Mapp and Lucia, which recounts the eccentric tales of various women in the 1920s and their fight for social status, Mapp and Lucia sees the two iconic protagonists – Emmeline Lucas and Elizabeth Mapp – finally cross paths. It is the fourth book in Benson’s hugely successful series. Renowned show-off Mrs Emmeline ‘Lucia’ Lucas decides to take up summer residence in the small seaside resort of Tilling, home to none other than the formidable Miss Elizabeth Mapp.

This is a beautiful, moving tale from the best-selling author of the Flashman Papers. To the young Lady Margaret Dacre, raised in the rich security of Queen Elizabeth's court, the Scottish border was a land of blood and brutal violence, where raid and murder were commonplace, and her broad inheritance lay at the mercy of the outlaw riders and feuding tribes of England's last frontier.

For decades Hazie Coogan has tended to the outsized needs of Katherine “Miss Kathie” Kenton, veteran of multiple marriages, career comebacks, and cosmetic surgeries. But danger arrives with gentleman caller Webster Carlton Westward III, who worms his way into Miss Kathie’s heart - and boudoir. Soon, Hazie discovers that this bounder has already written a celebrity memoir foretelling Miss Kathie’s death in an upcoming musical extravaganza. As the body count mounts, Hazie must execute a plan to save Katherine Kenton for her fans and for posterity.

In 1977, Ickey Jerusalem, San Francisco’s golden-boy poet laureate (based on Blake), is found dead in a locked, first-class toilet on an arriving red-eye flight. Ded Smith, a desperately unhappy, intelligent philistine with a highly developed philosophy to match, is called in to investigate the poet’s death. Thus begins a series of hilarious encounters with the members of Jerusalem’s coterie (updated amalgams of characters from Blake’s work).

His Royal Highness The Duke of Edinburgh, KG, KT, OM, GBE has been at the forefront of British public life since he married Princess Elizabeth in 1947. In the 70 years since, his wit (and the occasional 'gaffe') has continued to endear him to the nation, as he travelled the world taking his unique and charmingly British sense of humour to its far-flung corners. In the year in which the Prince has stepped down from his royal duties, this joyous and timely book celebrates his wry humour and supremely wicked wit.

Jane Austen skewers the novelistic extremes of her day made popular in many 18th-century Gothic potboilers. Dilapidated castles, locked rooms, inexplicable chests, enigmatic notes, and tyrannical fathers all figure into Northanger Abbey, but with a decidedly sardonic twist.

In this follow-up to Austenland, Charlotte Kinder is eager to escape the numbness she feels after her divorce. Deciding to get away, she visits the Regency-themed Pembrook Park resort in England, where talented actors set the perfect scene. But with everyone playing a role, it’s hard to distinguish reality from fantasy. So when Charlotte’s heart stirs, she wonders if she’s simply caught up in the experience - or if her ability to feel is finally returning.

Meet the Devohrs: Zee, a Marxist literary scholar who detests her parents' wealth but nevertheless finds herself living in their carriage house; Gracie, her mother, who claims she can tell your lot in life by looking at your teeth; and Bruce, her step-father, stockpiling supplies for the Y2K apocalypse and perpetually late for his tee time. Then there's Violet Devohr, Zee's great-grandmother, who they say took her own life somewhere in the vast house, and whose massive oil portrait still hangs in the dining room.

It’s the summer of 1982 and fourteen-year-old Swanna Swain is the only one left at camp. The place is a ghost town by the time her mother Val finally shows up six hours late—stoned and radiant—in a Ford pickup driven by Borislav, her new young Russian lover. Assuming she is headed home to her air-conditioned Upper West Side apartment, Swanna and her lovable younger brother Madding are instead dragged to Vermont—to an artist colony where kids are not welcome and they are forced to sleep in the back of the truck, while Val is cozy inside the house with the Russian.

Dr. Siri might finally be allowed to retire (again). Although he loves his two morgue assistants, he’s tired of being Laos’ national coroner - a job he never wanted in the first place. Plus, he’s pushing 80 and wants to spend some time with his wife before his untimely death, which has been predicted by the local transvestite fortune teller. But retirement is not in the cards for Dr. Siri after all. He’s dragged into one last job for the Lao government: supervising an excavation for the remains of a US fighter pilot....

Cette guerre inventée entre l'homme et l'animal c'est, en 1936, tout ce que le monde embrase : le nazisme, l'antisémitisme, la croyance dans le progrès ; ce livre brosse avec humour une satire des hommes et de leur société. Mêlant la parodie au fantastique, à la fois roman et conte philosophique, il se révèle, sous une apparente légèreté, extrêmement lucide et sombre. Étonnamment perspicace quant au devenir de l'Europe quelques années plus tard, "La Guerre des Salamandres" anticipe également les problèmes écologiques.