Showing titles in Literature & Fiction

His name is Failure. Timmy Failure. And his detective agency is on the verge of global domination. Global riches. Global fame. And yet the gods keep throwing him curveballs: for starters, academic probation. The coveted Miracle Report is the key to everything, including a good grade. It’s dirty business. It’s best you know nothing. But one thing is for sure: Timmy Failure will be triumphant again!

Things are not well within the Lodrak Empire. An entire city goes up in smoke and ash, and an entire province is slowly being consumed by an ever-expanding cloud of death. But while the humans rally to contain the fallout of this disaster, they are much quicker to pin the blame for it on their elven neighbors to the north. With centuries' worth of strife and bad blood between the two nations flaring up, all out war is rapidly becoming an inevitability.

Dorothy Graham is dead, which is inconvenient, not least for her. Luckily, she has planned for this eventuality. Now, if any of the truly dreadful people she is related to want to get their hands on her money, they’re going to have to do so via a fiendish difficult and frankly bizarre competition of Dorothy’s devising. After all, just because you’re dead, it doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy a last laugh at the expense of people who made your life miserable.

Alice's journey begins as all good journeys do: hitting on the sales guy at REI. After a tumultuous breakup, a quick career transition, family upheaval, and a sobriety journey that didn't fix her life quite as much as she expected it to, Alice decides that the only way to solve all her problems is to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. But as she begins preparing for the months-long quest, she realizes the answers she's seeking might not be on top of a snow-covered mountain. Especially since she just learned there was snow in California.

In the Angler’s Rest, drinking hot scotch and lemon, sits one of Wodehouse’s greatest raconteurs. Mr Mulliner, his vivid imagination lubricated by Miss Postlethwaite the barmaid, has fabulous stories to tell of the extraordinary behaviour of his far-flung family... One of them concerns Wilfred, who lights on the formula for Buck-U-Uppo, a tonic given to elephants to enable them to face tigers with the necessary nonchalance. Its explosive effects on a shy young curate and then the higher clergy is gravely revealed.

The Wilderness Years are over. But not for long. At the end of Bridget Jones's Diary, Bridget hiccuped off into the sunset with man-of-her-dreams Mark Darcy. Now, in The Edge of Reason, she discovers what it is like when you have the man of your dreams actually in your flat and he hasn't done the washing-up, not just the whole of this week, but ever.

Events manager Rosie Burns is used to coping with the unexpected, at work and at home. When her daughter, Kate, accidentally became a teenage mum, Rosie stepped in, raising her granddaughter, Jo, so that Kate could pursue her career in international banking. Now Jo works in the family firm alongside accountant Bob (who's nursing an unrequited love for Rosie) and Tess (whose love life never ceases to amaze). Things are ticking along nicely, until Rosie gets a phone call out of the blue - after 15 years working abroad, Kate's lost her job and is coming home....

Jo Sorsby knows she is hiding from her past when she agrees to look after her uncle’s stationery shop. Spending her days glimpsing the lives of her customers as they experiment with what’s on offer is a welcome distraction from the life she has left behind. Yet far from home, Jo feels adrift... But when she meets Ruth, a vicar running from a secret, and Malcolm, a septuagenarian struggling to write his first book, she realises that she isn’t alone.

Ever been offered a promotion that seems too good to be true? You know - the sort they'd be insane to be offering to someone like you. The kind where you snap their arm off to accept, then wonder why all your long-serving colleagues look secretly relieved, as if they're off some strange and unpleasant hook...It's the kind of trick that deeply sinister companies like J.W. Wells & Co. pull all the time. Especially with employees who are too busy mooning over the office intern to think about what they're getting into.

When the zombie apocalypse hits the quiet Asheville, NC, subdivision of Whispering Pines, the residents don't turn to the police or the military. Nope. They rely on their iron-fisted Home Owners Association! Which Jace Stanford and his family aren’t too keen on. Undead hordes are hard enough to deal with in a post-apocalyptic hellscape, who needs HOA fines too?

In David Sedaris' world, no one is safe and no cow is sacred. A manic cross between Mark Leyner, Fran Lebowitz, and the National Enquirer, Sedaris' collection of essays is a rollicking tour through the national Zeitgeist: a do-it-yourself suburban dad saves money by performing home surgery; a man who is loved too much flees the heavyweight champion of the world; a teenage suicide tries to incite a lynch mob at her funeral; a bitter Santa abuses the elves.

Edith Lavery is a woman on the make. The attractive only child of a middle-class accountant, she leaves behind her dull job in a Chelsea estate agents and manages to bag one of the most eligible bachelors of the day: Charles Broughton, heir to the Marquess of Uckfield. But is life amongst the upper echelons of 'good' society all that it seems? Edith soon discovers there's much more to the aristocracy than dancing in Anabel's, shooting small birds and understanding which fork to use at dinner.

Margo Millet's got money troubles. As the child of a Hooters waitress and an ex-Pro-Wrestler, she's always known she'd have to make it on her own. When she finds herself pregnant by her college professor - who is very keen not to be involved - she realizes she will need cash fast. At twenty, alone with a baby, what Margo lacks in options she makes up for in ingenuity, and soon she has a plan: she'll start an OnlyFans as an experiment, producing content and writing storylines unlike anything else out there.

The sequel to Jonas Jonasson’s international best seller The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared. It all begins with a hot air balloon trip and three bottles of champagne. Allan and Julius are ready for some spectacular views, but they’re not expecting to land in the sea and be rescued by a North Korean ship, and they could never have imagined that the captain of the ship would be harbouring a suitcase full of contraband uranium on a nuclear weapons mission for Kim Jong-un....

Walsingford Hall belongs to Sir Buckstone, who is in a little financial difficulty. So for a little monetary help he puts a roof over the heads of an odd assortment of people.

Former Met police officer Jodie ‘Nosey’ Parker is working a trial period as an auxiliary Detective Sergeant with the Penstowan police force. But living and working alongside DCI Nathan Withers – while still trying to grow her catering company – brings its own challenges, especially when Jodie’s attention is quickly taken up by the suspicious drowning of a local fisherman.

All books in How to Survive the Afterlife in one box set for the first time. If you love the humor of Pratchett/Douglas Adams, the darkness of Stephen King, and the surrealism of Terry Gilliam, then this is must-listen. Includes: The Limpet Syndrome, Soul Catchers, Dead Ends, and the companion book Existential Crisis.

An achingly funny story about how to be your own hero when life pulls the rug out from under your feet. From the author of the bestselling You Had me at Hello. Delia Moss isn't quite sure where she went wrong. When she proposed and discovered her boyfriend was sleeping with someone else - she thought it was her fault. When she realised life would never be the same again - she thought it was her fault.

Listen to hilarious unabridged stories starring the ever-popular Jeeves and Wooster from the master of great British comedy: P. G. Wodehouse. Stories featured: "Jeeves Takes Charge", "Jeeves and The Unbidden Guest", "The Artistic Career of Corky", "The Aunt and the Sluggard", "Clustering Round Young Bingo", "Jeeves and the Hard-boiled Egg", and "The Rummy Affair of Old Biffy".

The complete 21st series of the award-winning BBC Radio 4 impressions show - plus three Christmas specials. The award-winning topical satire show returns with an online audience to serve up more mimicry, mockery and mordant wit. Series 21 brings us exclusive footage from Boris and Carrie's secret wedding, the truth behind the historic summit between Presidents Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin and the real secret of Andy Murray's success.