Showing titles in Satire

In the sequel to Portuguese Irregular Verbs, our hero, Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, is the unlikely choice to address veterinarians in the Ozark mountains of Arkansas; is dogged by dachshunds; becomes embroiled with that notorious Coptic schismatic, the Duke of Johannesburg (and his victim the Patriarch of Alexandria); and finally ends up being mobbed as the star attraction on a Mediterranean cruise ship.

Sherman McCoy is a WASP, bond trader and self-appointed 'Master of the Universe'. He has a fashionable wife, a Park Avenue apartment and a Southern mistress. His spectacular fall begins the moment he is involved in a hit-and-run accident in the Bronx. Prosecutors, newspaper hacks, politicians and clergy close in on him, determined to bring him down. Exuberant, scandalous and exceptionally discerning, The Bonfire of the Vanities was Tom Wolfe's first venture into fiction and cemented his reputation as the foremost chronicler of his age.

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 satiric novel by Evelyn Waugh, published in 1930. Set in England between the wars, the novel examines the frenetic but empty lives of the Bright Young Things, young people who indulge in constant party-going, heavy drinking, and promiscuous sex. At the novel's end, the realities of the world intrude, with Adam Fenwick-Symes, the protagonist, serving on a battlefield at the onset of another world war.

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.

From the double Man Booker Prize-winner, a savagely funny tale that revisits the characters from the much-loved Every Day is Mother’s Day. Muriel Axon is about to re-enter the lives of Colin Sidney and Isabel Field. It is ten years since her last tangle with them, but for Muriel this is not time enough. There are still scores to be settled, truths to be faced and vengeance to be wreaked.

Candide, is a French satire written in 1759 by Voltaire, a philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment. One of the finest satires ever written, this lively tale follows the absurdly melodramatic adventures of the youthful Candide, who is forced into the army, flogged, shipwrecked, betrayed, robbed, separated from his beloved Cunégonde, and tortured by the Inquisition. As Candide witnesses calamity upon calamity, he becomes disillusioned and discovers that all is not always for the best....

Growing, growing, gone… Penrith, in the heart of the Lake District, is not the kind of place you can easily vanish. Certainly not when the members of the Penrith Bingo Club are trying to track you down. But even stalwart sleuth, Amita Khatri, and her son in law, Jason, are foxed this time when...

¿Quién es Belaundia Fu? Es la mejor amiga de Marta a los siete años, la amiga invisible que se queda con ella cuando las cosas no salen bien y ni siquiera la abuela es capaz de consolarla. Belaundia Fu es la voz sensata, ideal e infalible que, en la adolescencia de Marta, le...

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 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.

When you find out your best friend and business partner is secretly sleeping with your wife, it may be time to move on.... From your job and your marriage.... Which is precisely what happened to Jamie Newgent. A change of lifestyle is what’s needed, and a bachelor pad on the fourth floor of a jutting tower provides a new home, a fresh start, and a new chapter in his life.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim written by Jonathan Coe, read by John Heffernan. Maxwell Sim seems to have hit rock bottom: separated from his wife and daughter, estranged from his father, and with no one to confide in even though he has 74 friends...

The rural town of Stockton, New York, is famous for nothing: No one was born there, no one died there, nothing of any historical import at all has ever happened there, which is why Solomon Kugel, like other urbanites fleeing their pasts and histories, decided to move his wife and young son there...

Cat's Cradle is Vonnegut's satirical commentary on modern man and his madness. An apocalyptic tale of this planet's ultimate fate, it features a little person as the protagonist; a complete, original theology created by a calypso singer; and a vision of the future that is at once blackly...

'An enthrallingly intricate novel . . . impressive' GUARDIAN 'There's something of F. Scott Fitzgerald about the way Cahill writes about the very rich' DAILY MAIL 'A biting satire of the art world's glamour, pomp and greed . . . lucid and evocative' DAILY TELEGRAPH 'A highbrow whodunnit, and...

In big stakes bass fishing tournaments, contestants will do anything to win. Maybe that's why there is a corpse floating in Coon Bog. Now it's up to R J Decker, novice private investigator, to find out who was dying to get the biggest fish. Help comes in the unlikely form of Skink, a half-mad hermit with a taste for road kill.

Still bruised and heartbroken from their last calamitous quest, Gorm Ingerson and his band of washed-up heroes try to make amends for the orcs they accidentally betrayed. But justice is put on hold when an old foe marches to the city gates. Gorm is horrified to discover a liche pitching the frightened city-dwellers on the merits of the undead lifestyle...at the head of a corpse army. To save the city from high-pressure sales tactics and an inevitable siege, the dwarf warrior and his misfit band hatch a harebrained scheme that lands them at the top of the king’s kill list.

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.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Closed Circle by Jonathan Coe, read by Nicholas Burns. On Millennium night, with Blair presiding over a superficially cool, sexed-up new version of the country, Benjamin Trotter finds himself watching the celebrations on his parents' TV. Watching, in...