Historical Humor

The author of The End of the Road and Small Comforts returns to his fictional Alaska town, The End of the Road, to present more unforgettable stories about its colorful inhabitants and their doings.

Twenty years after ruling the halls of her suburban Chicago high school, Lissy Ryder doesn't understand why her glory days ended. Back then, she was worshipped...beloved...feared. Present day, not so much. She's been pink-slipped from her high-paying job, dumped by her husband and kicked out of her condo. Now, at 37, she's struggling to start a business out of her parents' garage and sleeping under the hair-band posters in her old bedroom. Lissy finally realizes karma is the only bitch bigger than she was.

Why does the powerfully built, golden-haired Lord St. Evert dress like an overdone dandy? His outlandish wardrobe belies the hard unyielding lines of his face. Whoever he is, he's ruining Elizabeth Hampton's desperate scheme to secure a rich husband. Terribly vexing, to arrive at the most fashionable breakfast party of the season wearing a perfectly stunning Chinese silk gown, only to discover that Lord St. Evert is clad in unmentionables cut from identical cloth.

Irene Bobs loves fast driving. Her husband is the best car salesman in southeastern Australia. Together they enter the Redex Trial, a brutal race around the ancient continent, over roads no car will ever quite survive. With them is their lanky, fair-haired navigator, Willie Bachhuber, a quiz show champion and failed schoolteacher who calls the turns and creeks crossings on a map that will remove them, without warning, from the white Australia they all know so well. This is a thrilling high-speed story that starts in one way and then takes you someplace else. It is often funny, more so as the world gets stranger, and always compelling, even as you learn a history these characters never knew themselves.

From the recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature, a "brilliant...enchanting novel" (New York Times Book Review) of romance, deceit, religion, and magic set in 18th-century Portugal at the height of the Inquisition.

A Kasey Michaels Alphabet Regency Romance. Tansy Tamerlane, left penniless by her late father, is working as a governess when she's caught up in playing chaperone to a distant cousin, the sister of a duke. Ashley Benedict, Duke of Avonall, is a man beleaguered. His grandmother is a terror; his aunt is odd. Now, Ashley has a new problem ... how to keep himself from falling for Tansy Tamerlane. Kasey Michaels Alphabet Regency Romance Titles: The Belligerent Miss Boynton The Tenacious Miss Tamerlane The Rambunctious Lady Royston The Lurid Lady Lockport The Savage Miss Saxon The Questioning ...

A #1 Kindle Bestseller in Time Travel and Victorian Romance! MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE In 1880’s Galveston, dairy farmer Jake Blarney is left devastated when his wife betrays and leaves him, drowning in the seas, leaving Jake with twin baby daughters to raise. Angry and forlorn, Jake pens a message in a bottle beseeching the Fates to bring him a new bride and hurls the bottle into the sea. But never does he dream that Destiny will summon him a new bride from across the vast gulf of time! BRIDE ACROSS TIME In modern-day Galveston, college professor Priscilla Pemberton is a forsaken bride, hurt ...

The true test for surviving war lies in the mind, not on the battlefield. Inspired by the author’s own experiences of US military operations during the Vietnam War, Boot is a debut literary novel that charts the journey of marine George Orwell Hill, known affectionately as G.O. by his brothers-in-arms, as he comes to grips with the psychological impacts of war in the jungles and rice paddies of Southeast Asia.

The most fearsome enemy he ever faced. Of all the enemies that our hero has shrunk away from, there was one he feared above them all. By his own admission they gave him nightmares into his dotage. It was not the French, the Spanish, the Americans, or the Mexicans. It was not even the more exotic adversaries such as the Iroquois, Mahratta, or Zulus. While they could all make his guts churn anxiously, the foe that really put him off his lunch were the Ashanti.

It is 1994, and in the desert near Tillman, Arizona, 40 miles from Tucson, a grand experiment involving the future of humanity is underway. As climate change threatens the Earth, eight scientists, four men and four women dubbed the Terranauts, have been selected to live under glass in E2, a prototype of a possible off-Earth colony. Their sealed three-acre compound comprises five biomes - rain forest, savanna, desert, ocean, and marsh - and enough wildlife, water, and vegetation to sustain them.

Gretel - yes, that Gretel - is now all grown up and working as a private investigator in 18th-century Bavaria. Her professional interest is piqued when she begins to hear whispers of of mysterious goings-on off the coast of Schleswig-Holstein: sailors are disappearing, and there are rumors of mermaids and sea creatures and all manner of slippery, sea-based happenings. Ordinarily, Gretel's interest in sea life does not extend beyond that which is edible and already on the plate before her. However, funds are low....

A forged heirloom. A ruined reputation. And a spoonful of secrets. In a town where legacy is everything, forgery is personal. Magda Lane authenticated the silver. Ivy put it on display. One quiet swap and now the café is unraveling and Magda’s name is going down with it. The lock wasn’t picked. The display wasn’t touched. But the spoons? Fakes. Magda doesn’t do scandal. She does antiques and quiet afternoons. But now everyone’s looking at her like she got it wrong. A slick auctioneer with a legacy to reclaim. A locksmith willing to turn a blind eye. And Janice Bell, gracious, ...

Harry Flashman: the unrepentant bully of Tom Brown's schooldays, now with a Victoria Cross, has three main talents - horsemanship, facility with foreign languages, and fornication. A reluctant military hero, Flashman plays a key part in most of the defining military campaigns of the 19th century, despite trying his utmost to escape them all.

Set in 1960's London, Funny Girl is a lively account of the adventures of the intrepid young Sophie Straw as she navigates her transformation from provincial ingnue to television starlet amid a constellation of delightful characters. Insightful and humorous, Nick Hornby's latest does what he does best: endears us to a cast of characters who are funny if flawed, and forces us to examine ourselves in the process.

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.

Florida, circa 1980. Reed Crowe, the eponymous Florida Man, is a middle-aged beach bum, beleaguered and disenfranchised, living on ill-gotten gains deep in the jungly heart of Florida. When sinkholes start opening on Emerald Island, not only are Reed Crowe's seedy businesses - a moribund motel and a shabby amusement park - endangered, but so are his secrets. Crowe, amateur spelunker, begins uncovering artifacts that change his understanding of the island’s history, as well as his understanding of his family’s birthright as pioneering homesteaders.

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.

At the turn of the 20th century, as he composes a treatise on melancholy, Jacov Reinhardt sets off from his small Croatian village in search of his hero and unwitting mentor, Emiliano Gomez Carrasquilla, who is rumored to have disappeared into the South American jungle - "not lost, mind you, but retired." Jacov's narcissistic preoccupation with melancholy consumes him, and as he desperately recounts the myth of his journey to his trusted but ailing scribe, hope for an encounter with the lost philosopher who holds the key to Jacov's obsession seems increasingly unlikely.

Even as Julie worries about how her children are coping with the loss of their father and the recent move to their new ghost-town home in Mae’s Second Chance, her youngest son is quietly searching through one of the centuries-old buildings for a treasure he believes that his father means for him to find. But what he eventually discovers is not at all what he expects.Julie Engstrom has brought her family to the deserted ghost town of Mae’s Second Chance. She knew that her family needed something different as they struggled to deal with the loss that has changed their lives forever. Her ...

Fitz is all about the rigors of science... ...until he's offered a shot at being the Wizard's Apprentice! Step back into the continuing adventures of Kevin Fitzgerald, Deziri, the dazzlingly magical and beautiful wood nymph, and Katie, his spunky and completely uninhibited Apprentice companion as they struggle to avoid the evil of The Shade and figure out what has caused The Imbalance in the universe. What is behind the mysterious disappearances of the Warlock, Brant and the other senior Wizards, Dutch Dunne and Jimmy Burke? With everyone missing, he has nowhere to turn but the Forest realm...