Showing titles in Satire

Brought to you by Penguin. Sometimes we must look to the past to survive the future. A novel about what really matters in life from the bestselling author of Captain Corelli's Mandolin Q wants a simpler and safer life. His work as a quantum cryptographer for the government has led him to believe...

Has she gone too far this time? It's all gone horribly wrong and the worst has happened.Alison is in deep, deep trouble and no amount of lies are helping. Forgetting the first rule of lying, she's protesting her innocence but no one will believe a word she says no matter how hard she lies. Mother's dark prophecy that she'd get what she deserves haunts her as she contemplates the best years of her life behind bars.

A high NRG, whip-smart look at the state of modern Britain through the eyes of a disparate band of rave rebels, from the author of the acclaimed, bestselling debut The Young Team and one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. William Patterson – better known as DJ Turbo – is living a...

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.

Jack Gladney is the creator and chairman of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill. This is the story of his absurd life; a life that is going well enough, until a chemical spill from a rail car releases an 'Airborne Toxic Event' and Jack is forced to confront his biggest fear – his own...

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.

In music, counterpoint is the art of writing melodies that play in conjunction with one another, according to a strict set of rules, in order to emphasize the melody by contrast. In debate, point/counterpoint is a means of persuasion in which the speaker begins by conceding to their opponent’s argument before refuting it wholeheartedly. Aldous Huxley follows these traditions in his masterpiece Point Counter Point. The polarity between passion and reason in the intellectual life of the 1920s is demonstrated both in form and in theme in Huxley’s ambitious satire.

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.

In the summer of 1983, 23-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the wealthy Feddens: Gerald, an ambitious Tory MP, his wife, Rachel, and their children, Toby and Catherine. Innocent of politics and money, Nick is swept up into the Feddens' world and an era of endless possibility, all the while pursuing his own private obsession with beauty. 

The Venislarn. Vastly intelligent aliens from another dimension or dribbling insane gods from a distant realm? It’s impossible to tell. What’s certain is that they’re here and they’re going to destroy our world. But, hey, there’s no mileage to be gained from telling the kiddywinks that monsters are real.

Adrian Mole is middle-aged but still scribbling. Working as a bookseller and living in Leicester's Rat Wharf; finding time to write letters of advice to Tim Henman and Tony Blair; locked in mortal combat with a vicious swan called Gielgud; measuring his expanding bald spot; and trying to win-over the voluptuous Daisy.... Adrian yearns for a better more meaningful world. But he's not ready to surrender his pen yet.

Meet Jeff: overworked, underappreciated, and stuck granting 1,000 wishes for humanity before he can retire or get promoted—whichever comes first. Unfortunately, Jeff isn’t your typical genie. He’s a cosmic entity with an attitude problem, a hatred of paperwork, and a flair for granting wishes in the most inconvenient, ridiculous ways possible.

Set in a garden in Tehran in the early 1940s, where three families live under the tyranny of a paranoid patriarch, My Uncle Napoleon is a rich, comic and brilliantly on-target send-up of Iranian society. The novel is, at its core, a love story. But the young narrator's delicate and pure love for his cousin Layli is constantly jeopardized by an unforgettable cast of family members and the hilarious mayhem of their intrigues and machinations. It is also a social satire, a lampooning of the widespread Iranian belief that foreigners are responsible for events that occurs in Iran.

Brought to you by Penguin. From the prize-winning, bestselling author of Middle England. In the heady summer of 1977, a naïve young woman called Calista sets out from Athens to venture into the wider world. On a Greek island that has been turned into a film set, she finds herself working for...

The hated house of her childhood has been sold, and Alison now has a smart new apartment and a new, exciting career. Everything, in fact, that she’s ever dreamed of. Mother is but a sad and miserable memory. Life is good, life is slim. But then it all starts to go horribly wrong...again, and Alison has to ask herself - is it her? She’s trying her very best to be a good person, but it’s harder than she thought it would be and, if she’s honest, which she’s mostly not; it’s a bit boring. Is she more like Mother than she’d care to admit?

Soseki Natsume's comic masterpiece, I Am a Cat, satirizes the foolishness of upper-middle class Japanese society during the Meiji era. With acerbic wit and sardonic perspective, it follows the whimsical adventures of a world-weary stray kitten who comments on the follies and foibles of the people around him. A classic of Japanese literature, I Am a Cat is one of Soseki's best-known novels. Considered by many as the greatest writer in modern Japanese history, Soseki's I Am a Cat is a classic novel sure to be enjoyed for years to come.

A collection of BBC readings and dramas celebrating the much-loved schoolboy terror. First featured in five books by Geoffrey Willans, with cartoon illustrations by Ronald Searle, Nigel Molesworth is one of the funniest comic creations in literature. A superbly satirical chronicler of 1950s England, he influenced a generation with his anarchic take on life.

BY THE BESTSELLING, PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF THE HANDMAID'S TALE 'Clara', she said, 'do you think I'm normal?' 'I'd say you're almost abnormally normal, if you know what I mean.' Marian is determinedly ordinary, waiting to get married. She likes her work, her broody flatmate and her sober fiancé...

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.

The Freaks of Mayfair by E.F. Benson is a series of satirical sketches introducing us to some bizarre inhabitants of Edwardian High Society of Mayfair, which was, and still is today, the stamping ground of the very wealthy. Each sketch introduces a different type of "freak". Sir Louis and Lady Mary Marigold turn snobbism into fine art; Sarah Whitehand is the social-climbing wife of an American toilet bowl magnate, and the so-called "Grizzly Kittens", Babs Begum and Charlie Gordon, cling desperately to their youth as they totter toward old age.