Satire Comedy

Susan Frobisher and Julie Wickham are turning 60. They live in a small Dorset town and have been friends since school. On the surface Susan has it all - a lovely house and a long marriage to accountant Barry. Life has not been so kind to Julie, but now, with several failed businesses and bad relationships behind her, she has found stability: living in a council flat and working in an old people's home.

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.

Blending fact and fiction, China Dream is an unflinching satire of totalitarianism. Ma Daode, a corrupt and lecherous party official, is feeling pleased with himself. He has an impressive office, three properties, and multiple mistresses who text him day and night. After decades of loyal service, he has been appointed director of the China Dream Bureau, charged with replacing people's private dreams with President Xi Jinping's great China Dream of national rejuvenation.

Says Charles Pooter, "I fail to see - because I do not happen to be a 'somebody' - why my diary should not be interesting." Surprisingly, Mr. Pooter's life is fascinating! The fascination is two-fold: firstly, his astounding arrogance that we should care about his domestic trivia and narcissistic scribblings. Secondly, we can all sympathize with (and wince at!) this ridiculous slave to convention.

Gli anni passano, ma i problemi restano – soprattutto quelli finanziari – e la contessa Maria Vittoria dal Pozzo della Cisterna, perseguitata dall'Agenzia delle Entrate, vive nell'incubo di un futuro in cui per colazione non potrà più permettersi le sue adorate frolle di pasticceria e dovrà ripiegare sui biscotti industriali. È la sua amata Anna, la ragazza che sarebbe diventata sua nuora se suo figlio Emanuele non si fosse fatto lasciare, a proporle un'immediata fonte di introiti: partecipare, in veste di Vip pagata, a una crociera.

When Scat comes up with an idea for the hottest new soda ever, he's sure he'll retire as the next savvy marketing success story. But in the treacherous waters of corporate America, there are no sure things. Suddenly Scat finds himself scrambling to save not only his idea, but his yet-to-be-realized career. With the help of a scarily beautiful and brainy girl called 6, he sets out on a mission to reclaim the fame and fortune that, time and again, elude him.

Understanding the urgent need for a deeply thoughtful, balanced book to explain our national political process, Dave Barry has not even come close. Though he himself has covered many campaigns, run for president several times, and run for cover at the rainy inauguration of George W. Bush (the man will spare nothing for his art), Barry has instead outdone himself.

In this slyly funny and lavishly inventive novel, Nobel Prize winner V. S. Naipaul traces the unlikely career of Ganesh Ramsumair, a failed schoolteacher and impecunious village masseur who in time becomes a revered mystic, a thriving entrepreneur, and the most beloved politician in Trinidad. Witty, tender, filled with the sights, sounds, and smells of Trinidad's dusty Indian villages, The Mystic Masseur is Naipaul at his most expansive and evocative.

Edward St. Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels were some of the most celebrated works of fiction of the past decade. Ecstatic praise came from a wide range of admirers, from literary superstars such as Zadie Smith, Francine Prose, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Michael Chabon to pop-culture icons such as Anthony Bourdain and January Jones. Now St. Aubyn returns with a hilariously smart send-up of a certain major British literary award in this witty audiobook.

Right Ho, Jeeves sees Bertie Wooster blithely attempting to assume the role of Jeeves himself as a matters-of-the-heart adviser. Very unwise: from Gussie Fink-Nottle's romance with Madeline Bassett, to Tuppy Glossop and his stop/go engagement to Angela Travers, the young master succeeds only in making a bally mess of everyone's love-lives.

Nobody blows smoke like Nick Naylor. He’s a spokesman for the Academy of Tobacco Studies - in other words, a flack for cigarette companies, paid to promote their product on talk and news shows. The problem? He’s so good at his job, so effortlessly unethical, that he’s become a target for both anti-tobacco terrorists and for the FBI. In a country where half the people want to outlaw pleasure and the other want to sell you a disease, what will become of Nick Naylor?

Anatole France (1844-1924) was a French poet, journalist, and novelist who wrote several best sellers. The Revolt of the Angels is a mischievous take on the theology of modern society; it chronicles the thoughts of Arcade, a lowly guardian angel, as he discovers the ugly truths of his divine master in the library of his human charge As Maurice, the young man abandoned by Arcade, struggles to get his guardian back, one gets a view of a wide variety of the author’s artistic personalities, most of whom are fallen angels.

They call him the Anaconda, and I'm pretty sure it isn't because he likes snakes. Nick Jenson is my neighbor. My hot, oh-so-sexy, very-well-equipped neighbor that I'd spend hours watching from the safety of my bedroom window. I saw lots of things I probably shouldn't have. Sometimes I'd touch myself, imagining it were his hands roaming over my body instead of my own. I had just one mission - to find out if the rumors were true.

Warning: This isn't the real thing...it's funnier! "Gerber's affectionate, giggle-inducing send-up is one giant step toward restoring the somewhat debased art form known as 'parody,'" says Sean Kelly, former editor of National Lampoon. If you love Harry Potter - or if you have had enough of him! - you've gotta hear this.

In the latest entertaining and hilarious Professor Dr. Dr. Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld novel, our hopelessly out-of-touch hero is forced to confront uppity librarians, the rector of the university, and a possible hostile takeover, all while trying to remain studiously above it all.

Jim and Kram are back in their second hilarious romp around their secluded Southeast Alaskan island. With a serial killer at large (a cereal serial killer, to be more accurate), an unlucky entrepreneur with an out-of-control facial tic, and the nephew of a notorious crime boss setting up shop on the island, Lieutenant Jim Wekle will have his work cut out for him.

Après la mort de son père, Michel, fonctionnaire quadragénaire et blasé, décide de partir en Thaïlande pour goûter aux plaisirs exotiques. Il y rencontre Valérie, cadre dans une grande société de voyages, à qui il soufflera sa théorie sur les vraies motivations des Européens en quête de sensations fortes. Embarqué dans la lutte pour le profit à tout prix, où le corps est plus que jamais une marchandise, Michel jette un regard cynique sur la société occidentale.

Campbell Flynn, art historian, professor, and fêted fixture of the literati, always knew that when his life came crashing down, it would happen in public—yet he never imagined that a single year in London would expose so much. He’s never taken other people half as seriously as they take themselves, which is the first of his mistakes. The second is a new project: opportunistic and precisely calibrated to rake in a fortune.

Newly reissued for the modern listener, Martin Amis’s Success is “a terrifying, painfully funny, Swiftian exercise in moral disgust” (The Observer). Foster brothers Terence Service and Gregory Riding could not be more different from one another—Terry “a quivering condom of neurosis and...

Set in Ireland prior to its achieving legislative independence from Britain in 1782, Castle Rackrent tells the story of three generations of an estate. One of the main sources of inspiration for the novel was a chronicle of her own family history called The Black Book of Edgeworthstown, which contain legal struggles of the Edgeworth's similar to those portrayed in the novel.