Satire Comedy

The brilliant Alexander McCall Smith became an international sensation with his New York Times best-selling No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency novels. His award-winning wit, made famous through that series, is fully on display in 44 Scotland Street.

The new book censor hasn't slept soundly in weeks. By day he combs through manuscripts at a government office, looking for anything that would make a book unfit to publish-allusions to queerness, unapproved religions, any mention of life before the Revolution. By night the characters of literary classics crowd his dreams, and pilfered novels pile up in the house he shares with his wife and daughter. As the siren song of forbidden reading continues to beckon, he descends into a netherworld of resistance fighters, undercover booksellers, and outlaw librarians.

"Monsieur Haneda était le supérieur de monsieur Omochi, qui était le supérieur de monsieur Saito, qui était le supérieur de mademoiselle Mori, qui était ma supérieure. Et moi, je n'étais la supérieure de personne. On pourrait dire les choses autrement. J'étais aux ordres de mademoiselle Mori, qui était aux ordres de monsieur Saito, et ainsi de suite, avec cette précision que les ordres pouvaient, en aval, sauter les échelons hiérarchiques. Donc, dans la compagnie Yumimoto, j'étais aux ordres de tout le monde."

From his first novel – Less Than Zero – published when he was still a college student – to his most recent – the fierce American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis has been a powerful and original presence in contemporary literature, whether giving voice to a previously inchoate generation or provoking a controversy that raged throughout the culture. Now he takes a quantum leap forward: an awesome reckoning of the American Century at endgame. In Glamorama, a young man in what is recognizably fashion and celebrity-obsessed Manhattan is gradually, imperceptibly drawn into a shadowy looking-glass of that society, there and in London and Paris, and then finds himself trapped on the other side, in a much darker place where fame and terrorism and family and politics are inextricably linked and sometimes indistinguishable. At once implicated and horror-stricken, his ways of escape blocked at every turn, he ultimately discovers – back on the other, familiar side – that there was no mirror, no escape, no world but this one in which hotels implode and planes fall from the sky.

Set in the 26th century A.D., Yevgeny Zamyatin's masterpiece describes life under the regimented totalitarian society of OneState, ruled over by the all-powerful "Benefactor." Recognized as the inspiration for George Orwell's 1984, We is the archetype of the modern dystopia, or anti-Utopia: a great prose poem detailing the fate that might befall us all if we surrender our individual selves to some collective dream of technology and fail in the vigilance that is the price of freedom.

Eliot Rosewater, a drunk volunteer fireman and president of the fabulously rich Rosewater Foundation, is about to attempt a noble experiment with human nature, with a little help from writer Kilgore Trout. The result is Kurt Vonnegut's funniest satire, an etched-in-acid portrayal of the greed, hypocrisy, and follies of the flesh we are all heir to.

These are the voyages of the starship A.S.F. Willful Child. Its ongoing mission: to seek out strange new worlds on which to plant the Terran flag, to subjugate and if necessary obliterate new life-forms, to boldly blow the... And so we join the not-terribly-bright but exceedingly cock-sure Captain Hadrian Sawback and his motley crew on board the Starship Willful Child for a series of devil-may-care, near-calamitous and downright chaotic adventures through "the infinite vastness of interstellar space".

When Adeline Bertrand-Verdon, the haughty, conniving president of the Proust Association, is murdered, Inspector Jean-Pierre Foucheroux is called on to lead the investigation. Soon Inspector Foucheroux is overwhelmed by a seemingly endless list of suspects: from her assistant to her colleagues, her fiancé to her lover, almost everyone Adeline knew had motive to kill her.

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.

In big stakes bass fishing tournaments, contestants will do anything to win. Maybe that's why there is a corpse floating in Coon Bog. Now it's up to R J Decker, novice private investigator, to find out who was dying to get the biggest fish. Help comes in the unlikely form of Skink, a half-mad hermit with a taste for road kill.

Kurt Vonnegut's first novel spins the chilling tale of engineer Paul Proteus, who must find a way to live in a world dominated by a supercomputer and run completely by machines. Paul's rebellion is vintage Vonnegut – wildly funny, deadly serious, and terrifyingly close to reality.

Set at a small, affluent liberal-arts college in New England at the height of the Reagan '80s, The Rules of Attraction is a startlingly funny, kaleidoscopic novel about three students with no plans for the future - or even the present - who become entangled in a curious romantic triangle.

Publié en 1830, Le Rouge et le Noir de Stendhal est un roman historique et psychologique qui dépeint l’ascension sociale et les ambitions de Julien Sorel, un jeune homme ambitieux issu d'une famille modeste. À travers ses tentatives pour gravir les échelons de la société, il se trouve souvent dans les intrigues au milieu de personnes influentes. Satire mordante de la société française du XIXe siècle, l'œuvre s'attaque aux hypocrisies de l'Église et des aristocraties, tout en constatant la folie des actions du protagoniste.

Meet Rabo Karabekian, a moderately successful surrealist painter who we meet late in life and see struggling (like all of Vonnegut's key characters) with the dregs of unresolved pain and the consequences of brutality. Loosely based on the legend of Bluebeard (best realized in Bela Bartok's one-act opera), the novel follows Karabekian through the last events in his life that is heavy with women, painting, artistic ambition, artistic fraudulence, and as of yet unknown consequence.

When store manager Big Will announces he is leaving, the members of Movement spot an opportunity. If they play their cards right, one of them just might land a management job, with all the stability and possibility for advancement that that implies. The members of Team Movement―including a comedy-obsessed oddball who acts half his age, a young woman clinging on to her “cool kid” status from high school, and a college football hopeful trying to find a new path―band together to set a just-so-crazy-it-might-work plot in motion.

Professional underachiever Dan Foster is finally taking a vacation. Sure, his life has been average at best, and yeah, he’s never quite lived up to his potential. But after a few Miller Lites in paradise with his girlfriend, Mara, things are starting to look up. Then the sun explodes....

He was born into an ancient powerful dynasty and, through no fault of his own, became one of the most recognisable men on the planet. His life was a constant barrage of press intrusion and manipulation. Until finally, he demanded that it stop. In order to get the privacy he so craved, he has written a frostbite-and-all book that goes deep inside the castle walls and exposes every shouting match, fist-fight, betrayal, teddy bear, awkward hug and tear-stained wedding rehearsal for the world to feast their eyes on.

A searing portrayal of Vienna's bourgeoisie, it begins with the arrival of an unnamed writer at an 'artistic dinner' hosted by a composer and his society wife-a couple he once admired and has come to loathe. The guest of honor, a distinguished actor from the Burgtheater, is late. As the other guests wait impatiently, they are seen through the critical eye of the writer, who narrates a silent but frenzied tirade against these former friends, most of whom have been brought together by Joana, a woman they buried earlier that day.

What’s a white knight to do when his princess is causing utter havoc, leading in mass murder? Go to the famous Black Sorcerer of Grimslock for help, apparently. What’s a black sorcerer to do when the white knight comes to him for help? Keep him, naturally.

In the year 2038, there’s only one destination that can play host to the world’s wealthiest adventure seekers: the Pengalaman Island Resort and Virtual Reality Theme Park. Located on a private South Pacific island, guests here live out their wildest fantasies in custom-made virtual reality simulations while also enjoying the usual amenities of an exclusive five-star getaway. All is relatively breezy until famed billionaire and avid guest, Mr. Wagner, goes missing within a virtual simulation. His only hope? A daring rescue led by Derek Ambrose and his ragtag search party.