Life Satire

Turn every corner and you'll easily find someone ready to tell you what to do, but you won't find many willing to tell you what NOT to do. WHY? Because it would show vulnerability and may even be a little embarrassing. That's where F-BOMB YOUR LIFE COMES IN.

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.

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.

Jenny is unloved, unemployable and emotionally unfiltered. Her long-suffering friends seem sick of her, and whilst her social media portrays her life as a bed of roses, it is more of a dying succulent. Adults is what you want it to be. A misadventure of maturity, a satire on our age of self-promotion, a tender look at the impossibility of womanhood, a love story, a riot. And Emma Jane Unsworth is the only voice to hear it from. Adults is excruciating, a gut punch of hilarity and an audiobook laden with truth that you will listen to again and again.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Fear collected by Roald Dahl, read by Julian Rhind-Tutt, Kevin Eldon, Tom Felton and Rory Kinnear. An audio collection of deliciously dark ghost stories for adults, picked by Roald Dahl himself. Do you enjoy being scared? Featuring 14 classic spine-chilling stories chosen by Roald Dahl, these terrible tales of ghostly goings-on will have you shivering with fear as you listen.

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 ...

Wannabe actress Dani Steele's résumé resembles a cautionary tale on how not to be famous. She's pushing thirty and stuck in a dead-end insurance job, and her relationship status is holding at uncommitted. With unbearably perfect sisters and a mother who won't let her forget it, Dani has two go-tos for consolation: maple scones and a blog in which she pours her heart out to her celebrity idol. He's the man her father never was, no boyfriend will ever be - and not so impossible a dream as one might think.

With freshman year behind her, things look grim for Rachael O'Brien's summer back home in Canton, Ohio, where the chances of hooking up with her crush seem to fall between slim and none. As if "quality time" working in her father's restoration shop isn't tortuous enough, his ditzy, age-inappropriate aerobics-instructor girlfriend moves into their house and tries to bond.

La obra de Francisco Quevedo abarca la mayoría de los géneros prosísticos del siglo XVIII y refleja su visión pesimista de la sociedad española de los Austrias menores. El Buscón, extraordinaria novela picaresca, combina la crítica social con la intención de crear una obra de arte del lenguaje.

* BERYL AND FRED IN SPAIN now available, containing this book plus A Cat called Cheryl, with Fred and Beryl at a reduced price.* When Beryl and Fred decide to sell up and take a camper van tour around Spain with their lovable Cocker Spaniel, Ted, little do they realise how eventful their poorly planned trip will turn out to be. Intending to tour the whole country thoroughly in an anti-clockwise direction, one unexpected incident after another throws them off track and sees their faithful VW Camper, Vernon, transporting them to the south coast well ahead of any real or imagined schedule. ...

Framed by the oil shale bust and the real estate boom, by protests against Reagan and against the Gulf War, The Optimistic Decade takes us into the lives of five unforgettable characters and is a sweeping novel about idealism, love, class, and a piece of land that changes everyone who lives on it. There is Caleb Silver, the beloved founder of the back-to-the-land camp Llamalo, who is determined to teach others to live simply. There are the ranchers, Don and son Donnie, who gave up their land to Caleb, having run out of options after Exxon came and went and left them bankrupt.

Jacob Grove grew up in a house that looked like it swallowed Versailles, well not quite that big, but it was an impressive estate on the water in Kingspoint, New York. Every year his parents, Peggy and Daniel Grove had a small Halloween party. In 1992 due to unforeseen circumstances, the party was canceled. The circumstances were that a neighbor plowed Daniel over with his Ferrari while he was bent over picking up dog poop. It was the dog's last poop, and as it turned out, it was Daniel's last poop as well.

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.

After eight and a half years and 323 pageants, Miranda Miller has become the ultimate stage mother. Her mission in life is to see that her nine-year-old daughter, Bailey, continues to be one of the most successful child pageant contestants in the southern United States. Lately, though, that mission has become increasingly difficult. Bailey wants to retire and has been secretly binge eating to make herself "unpageantable". But Miranda has a plan.

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.

This is advice from a fictional character and super villainess; follow it at your own risk.

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.

Siem Sigerius is a beloved, brilliant professor of mathematics with a promising future in politics. His family - including a loving wife, two gorgeous, intelligent stepdaughters, and a successful future son-in-law - and carefully appointed home in the bucolic countryside complete the portrait of a comfortable, morally upright household.

"[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 ...

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.