Life Satire

From Roald Dahl, the master of the sting in the tail, a newly collected audiobook of his darkest stories, read by Juliet Stevenson, Cillian Murphy, Adrian Scarborough, Tamsin Greig, Stephanie Beacham and Andrew Scott. 'There is a pleasure sure in being mad, which none but madmen know.' Our greatest fear is of losing control - of our lives, but, most of all, of ourselves. In these 10 unsettling tales of unexpected madness master storyteller Roald Dahl explores what happens when we let go our sanity.

Coach Randy is working mightily to keep it together, and not simply with his vaguely unhappy wife, distant child, and a new boss who's eliminating half the sales force. This season's soccer parents are a demanding bunch. Diane's wine-fueled group emails are almost unintelligible; team mom Jacqui's enthusiasm for the league verges on manic; a divorced couple can barely conceal their murderous rage at each other; and another mom is laser-focused on schooling everyone on what constitutes a healthy snack option.

Accidents happen. Especially around zombie turkeys. Then you add zombie humans, and problems proliferate. Mix in some ill-planned genetic engineering, and things get crazy. The insanity continues, from the story where zombies are merged with cucumbers to the one where two basement-dwelling nerds gain access to all video content from the past two hundred years - from aliens. Andy Zach pulls out all the stops on his imagination as he serves up this smorgasbord of silliness. Try it. Laughter is good for your soul.

Close to turning eighty, in the midst of a demographic winter, the millennial Ebenezer Espósito urgently needs to hire a prepaid nursing home. He doesn’t want just any nursing home... he wants the one with the best care, since he has no children to oversee his care. Fortunately, he has found the right place, where every detail will be taken into account. A short story of social satire about the problem faced by many communities that have entered the process of demographic winter.

Life is going pretty well for Raymond "Stick" Hart. He's happily married to the former Ponkaquogue Municipal Golf Club assistant pro, the beauteous Cajun firecracker Dannie, raising his rambunctious son, Charlie, and getting by writing smart-mouthed greeting cards for 50 bucks a pop. Then, one disaster of a day, Stick's world does a 10-car pile-up. Luckily, Stick has a solution to all his problems. He'll qualify for the British Open.

"[A] dystopian novel too close to today's political world..." –Lea Wait, USA Today Bestselling author 2020 International Book Awards Finalist – Humor 2019 Best Book Awards Finalist - Humor Life on Mars takes a satirical look at evolution vs. Intelligent Design — a sort of feint by anti-evolutionists to get creationism into the classroom by assiduously avoiding the mention of God. Instead, reference is made to a “higher” or “superior” intelligence. The novel’s conceit is this: what if the Intelligent Design folks are right and the evolutionists are wrong? What if a higher ...

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.

It's 1973, and David Leveraux has landed his dream job as a Flavorist-in-Training, working in the secretive industry where chemists create the flavors for everything from the cherry in your can of soda to the butter on your popcorn. While testing a new artificial sweetener - Sweetness #9 - he notices unusual side-effects in the laboratory rats and monkeys: anxiety, obesity, mutism, and a generalized dissatisfaction with life. David tries to blow the whistle, but he swallows it instead.

Nine-year-old Meena can't wait to grow up and break free from her parents. But as the daughter of the only Punjabi family in the mining village of Tollington, her struggle for independence is different from most. Meena wants fish fingers and chips, not chapati and dhal; she wants an English Christmas, not the usual interminable Punjabi festivities. But more than anything, she wants to roam the backyards of working-class Tollington with feisty Anita Rutter and her gang.

The book for anyone who’s ever worked in a restaurant or bar — or just wondered what really happens behind the kitchen doors. Jeff has spent years managing Parker’s Table & Bar, where customers get a seamless dining experience, and the staff survives on caffeine, profanity, and mutual suffering. Corporate keeps making things worse, servers handle food like goblins, and the kitchen operates on chaos. But somehow, it all works. Packed with hilarious workplace disasters, painfully accurate restaurant/bar absurdities, and a cast of characters you’ll swear you’ve met before, this is a ...

The big things in life look after themselves. Birth, love, death: they're all terrifically exciting, but they happen whether we like it or not. It's the little things in life that cause the most trouble. How do you deal with the million and one everyday challenges?

Zach Post is an editor for It magazine with an impressive history: his father is a famous architect, his mother a socialite, and he has attended Colgate, Berkley, and Liverpool University. Or, at least that's what everyone thinks. When obnoxious new editor Mark Larkin is quickly promoted, Zach's secrets are threatened, and his future no longer seems bright. But he knows what to do-Mark Larkin must be eliminated.

Jack Dee is here to help. Too often today the emphasis in psychotherapy is on providing clients with a metaphorical hug when what they so clearly need is good slap, so Jack Dee took the matter into his own hands, and whilst everyone else was baking bread and clearing out their cupboards during lockdown, he retrained online as a psychotherapist. After an incredibly gruelling four hours of study, he got his certificate of completion from The Ruislip College of Advansed Learning (sic).

Ben Jewell has hit a breaking point. His 10-year-old son, Jonah, has severe autism, and Ben and his wife, Emma, are struggling to cope. When Ben and Emma fake a separation - a strategic decision to further Jonah's case in an upcoming tribunal - Ben and Jonah move in with Georg, Ben's elderly father. In a small house in North London, three generations of men - one who can't talk, two who won't - are thrown together.

Perfect for fans of Gillian Flynn and Ruth Ware, "Behind The Stars" is this year's most addictive psychological suspense novel. Don't miss the thriller everyone will be talking about! Tara Alexander's dream comes true when her debut novel soars to the top of the bestseller lists. But her moment in the spotlight quickly turns into a nightmare as a flood of vicious one-star reviews threatens to destroy everything she's worked for. As the attacks intensify and become personal, Tara finds herself trapped in a terrifying web of online harassment. With her career in jeopardy and her sanity ...

Our Woman refuses to be sunk by what life is about to serve her. She's just caught her son Jimmy in the barn with another man. She's been accosted by Red the Twit, who claims to have done the unmentionable with her husband. And now her son's gone and joined the only group that will have him: an army division on its way to Afghanistan.

Managing Chaos and living with it when your best laid plans… get laid. The aircraft carrier USS America and its battle force visit Athens for a little fun in the sun for its 6,000 sailors. Spiros, the highly respected port Godfather, runs his own operations providing water taxis, barges of all types, unofficial security, and more. The more includes black marketing with visiting sailors providing cherished goods from the American Air Force Hellenikon Air Base Sales Store. He runs his port in such an extremely, profitable manner that no multi-national company could compete with him if such ...

'This little book is guaranteed to bring a smile to your face. I take it to bed and read it when I can't sleep. I read it while waiting for that the train that's always late. I read it while waiting for that boyfriend of mine who never turns up. It always brings a smile to my lips.' 'Lovely little book of witticisms, it had me chuckling out loud quite a few times. I'm going to keep my copy close at hand.'

This is the first of a series of essays to explore the age-old art of BS. What is BS? How can one master the art of BS? When, where, and how is BS appropriate? A tongue-in-cheek cultural and literary analysis of the history and nature of BS as an art form. Author and narrator Dan Sullivan tackles the subject in his customarily zany way, mixing anecdote, history, science, and of course, biology.

In these uncertain times we all need a coping mechanism. And Laura Lexx has found the obvious one - imagining life married to the sensible, no-nonsense man of our dreams, Jürgen Klopp. She thinks maybe he has something to do with football? More importantly, he definitely knows how to efficiently stack a dishwasher and would tell you honestly if you were being unreasonable about a colleague.