Showing titles in Satire

Modern technology is terrifying. The average smartphone carries out 3.36 billion instructions per second. The average person can carry out only one instruction in that time. Stop and think about that for a second. Sorry, that's two instructions; you won't be able to do that. But what if modern technology was... literally terrifying? What if there really was a ghost in the machine? Prepare to travel through the bad gateway as acclaimed actor, writer and comedian Tom Neenan (The Mash Report) finds out what horrors may be lurking in our apps and gadgets.

The new novel from the best-selling author of Miss Garnet's Angel holiday: a period in which a break is taken from work or studies for rest, travel, or recreation. Many years ago Mr Golightly wrote a work of dramatic fiction which grew to be an international best-seller. But his reputation is on the decline and he finds himself out of touch with the modern world. He decides to take a holiday and comes to the ancient village of Great Calne, hoping to use the opportunity to bring his great work up to date.

For years they thought it was just them. Irritated and tormented by everything around them from call centres to nose studs, from speed bumps to ring tones. Then along came the BBC2 series Grumpy Old Men, and the subsequent best-selling book, and they knew they were not alone.

There's a whole world of Dahl still to discover in a newly collected audiobook of his deliciously dark tales for adults. In war, are we at our heroic best or our cowardly worst? Featuring the autobiographical stories from Roald Dahl's time as a fighter pilot in the Second World War as well as seven other tales of conflict and strife, Dahl reveals the human side of our most inhumane activity.

As every schoolboy knows, you can fit the whole of England on the Isle of Wight. Grotesque, visionary tycoon Sir Jack Pitman takes the saying literally and does exactly that. He constructs on the island 'The Project', a vast heritage centre containing everything 'English', from Big Ben to Stonehenge, from Manchester United to the white cliffs of Dover. The project is monstrous, risky and vastly successful. In fact, it gradually begins to rival 'Old' England and even threatens to supersede it.

A savage and hilarious satire, Gulliver's Travels sees Lemuel Gulliver shipwrecked and adrift, subject to bizarre and unnerving encounters with - among others - quarrelling Lilliputians, philosophising horses, and the brutish Yahoo tribe that change his view of humanity - and himself - forever. Swift's classic of 1726 portrays mankind in a distorted hall of mirrors as a diminished, magnified, and finally, bestial species, presenting us with a comical yet uncompromising reflection of ourselves.

Marian is determinedly ordinary, waiting to get married. She likes her work, her broody flatmate and her sober fiancé Peter. All goes well at first, but Marian has reckoned without an inner self that wants something more, that calmly sabotages her careful plans, her stable routine—and her digestion. Marriage à la mode, Marian discovers, is something she literally can't stomach . . .

Back home after her life changing moment at Frogham train station, it seems that Alison's life is looking up, and there's even a possibility of romance on the horizon. Maybe she can finally stop lying. But it's not very long before it all starts to go wrong, and when Alison makes an enemy of Blake's new girlfriend, she decides it's time to get herself a proper job and make something of herself.

In sports, everybody loves redemption stories, the underdog who no one believes in but through sheer hard work wins it all. But no one tells the stories of the players who work hard and don’t make it. In pro football, 53 guys get on the roster. Ten make it to the practice squad. And then there’s the 64th Man - that’s Billy Logan (Cena), who seems to always be one spot from glory.

A wonderful, warm novel from a major new American voice. In The Art of Fielding, we see young men who know that their four years on the baseball diamond at Westish College are all that remain of their sporting careers. Only their preternaturally gifted fielder, Henry Skrimshander, seems to have the chance to keep his dream – and theirs, vicariously – alive, until a routine throw goes disastrously off course, and the fates of five people are upended.

From Roald Dahl, the master of the sting in the tail, a newly collected audiobook of his darkest stories, read by Will Self, Adrian Scarborough, Stephanie Beacham, Andrew Scott, Richard E Grant, Tamsin Greig, Mark Heap, Juliet Stevenson and Jessica Hynes. Even when we mean to be kind we can sometimes be cruel. We all have streaks of nastiness inside us. In these ten tales of cruelty, master storyteller Roald Dahl explores how and why it is we make others suffer.

Lucas knows the perfect night entails just three things: video games, wine, and pad thai. Peanuts are a must! Other people? Not so much. Why complicate things when he’s happy alone? Then one day the apartment board, a vexing trio of authority, rings his doorbell. And Lucas’s solitude takes a startling hike. They demand to see his frying pan. Someone left one next to the recycling room overnight, and instead of removing the errant object, as Lucas suggests, they insist on finding the guilty party. But their plan backfires. Colossally.

'If I've learned one thing,' the late, great Father Fehily used to say, 'it's that life, families and rugby balls don't always behave the way you want them to!' Looking at my life, I'd have to say, the dude wasn't wrong. My old man had been caught rigging a general election. My old dear was about to become a 70-year-old mother of six. And Honor was walking around in a yellow rain mac, telling everyone that the end of the world was coming. It was enough to drive a man to the brink.

Every day at 3:55 a.m., members of Team Movement clock in for their shift at big-box store Town Square in a small upstate New York town. Under the eyes of a self-absorbed and barely competent boss, they empty the day’s truck of merchandise, stock the shelves, and scatter before the store opens and customers arrive. Their lives follow a familiar if grueling routine, but their real problem is that Town Square doesn’t schedule them for enough hours―most of them are barely getting by, even while working second or third jobs

Evelyn and Muriel Axon, mother and daughter, lead a haunted existence. Objects of horror to their neighbours, they evade or terrorise any social worker who crosses their path. Inside their house, they pursue a covert persecution of each other, shrinking from the unseen occupants of their spare room. But change is in the air… Every Day is Mother's Day is a merciless comedy of colliding lives: of sex, death, madness, adultery and the social services.

God Is Disappointed in You is for people who would like to read the Bible...if it would just cut to the chase. Stripped of its arcane language and interminable passages, every book of the Bible is condensed down to its core message, in no more than a few pages each. Written by Mark Russell with cartoons by New Yorker cartoonist Shannon Wheeler, God Is Disappointed in You is a frequently hilarious, often shocking, but always accurate retelling of the Bible, including the parts selectively left out by Sunday School teachers.

From Roald Dahl, the master of the sting in the tail, a newly collected audiobook of his darkest stories, read by Richard Griffiths, Andrew Scott, Derick Jacobi, Mark Heap, Juliet Stevenson and Stephen Mangan. Why do we lie? Why do we deceive those we love most? What do we fear revealing? In these 10 tales of deception, master storyteller Roald Dahl explores our tireless efforts to hide the truth about ourselves.

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.

Peter Knox lives quietly in one of those small country villages that's up for the Village Garden of the Year award. Until Doc and Constance Rabbit move in next door, upsetting the locals (many of them members of governing political party United Kingdom Against Rabbit Population), complicating Peter's job as a Rabbit Spotter, and forcing him to take a stand, moving from unconscious leporiphobe to active supporter of the UK's amiable and peaceful population of anthropomorphised rabbits.

Unhappy with his programmed job of dentistry and inspired by a love of classic movies, Jared sets out on a bold mission: to use the power of his burgeoning feelings to forever change the world for him and all his kind. Unfortunately, Jared intends to do this by writing his own movie and things do not proceed according to plan....