Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Satire

For a policeman, there can be few things worse than a serial killer loose in your city. Except, perhaps, a serial killer who targets coppers, and a city on the brink of bloody revolution. For Commander Sam Vimes, it all feels horribly familiar. Caught on the roof of a very magical building during a storm, he's found himself back in his own rough, tough past without even the clothes he was standing up in when the lightning struck. Living in the past is hard, especially when your time travel companion is a serial killer who knows where you live.

When the neighbours in question are the proud empires of Klatch and Ankh-Morpork, those are going to be some pretty large garden tools indeed. Of course, no-one would dream of starting a war without a perfectly good reason...such as a 'strategic' piece of old rock in the middle of nowhere. It is after all every citizen's right to bear arms to defend their own. Even if it isn't technically their own. And even if they don't have much in the way of actual weaponry.

For Commander Vimes, Head of Ankh-Morpork City Watch, life consists of troubling times, linked together by...well, more troubling times. Right now, it's the latter. There's a werewolf with pre-lunar tension in the city and a dwarf with attitude and a golem who's begun to think for itself, but that's just ordinary trouble. The real problem is more puzzling - people are being murdered, but there's no trace of anything alive having been at the crime scene.

Koom Valley, the ancient battle where the trolls ambushed the dwarfs, or the dwarfs ambushed the trolls, was a long time ago. But if he doesn't solve the murder of just one dwarf, Commander Sam Vimes of Ankh-Morpork City Watch is going to see it fought again, right outside his office. With his beloved Watch crumbling around him and war-drums sounding, he must unravel every clue, outwit every assassin and brave any darkness to find the solution. And darkness is following him.

The City Watch needs men! But what it's got includes Corporal Carrot (technically a dwarf), Lance-Constable Cuddy (really a dwarf), Lance-Constable Detritus (a troll), Lance-Constable Angua (a woman...most of the time) and Corporal Nobbs (disqualified from the human race for shoving). And they need all the help they can get, because someone in Ankh-Morpork has been getting dangerous ideas - about crowns and legendary swords and destiny.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a policeman taking a holiday would barely have had time to open his suitcase before he finds his first corpse. Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch is on holiday in the pleasant and innocent countryside, but not for him a mere body in the wardrobe. There are many, many bodies - and an ancient crime more terrible than murder. He is out of his jurisdiction, out of his depth, out of bacon sandwiches; and out of his mind. But never out of guile. Where there is a crime there must be a punishment.

'Look after the dead,' said the priests, 'and the dead will look after you.' Wise words in all probability, but a tall order when, like Teppic, you have just become the pharaoh of a small and penniless country rather earlier than expected, and your treasury is unlikely to stretch to the building of a monumental pyramid to honour your dead father. He'd had the best education money could buy of course, but unfortunately the syllabus at the Assassin's Guild in Ankh-Morpork did not cover running a kingdom and basic financial acumen....

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.

A monument to sloth, rant and contempt, a behemoth of fat, flatulence and furious suspicion of anything modern—this is Ignatius J. Reilly of New Orleans, noble crusader against a world of dunces. The ordinary folk of New Orleans seem to think he is unhinged. Ignatius ignores them, heaving his vast bulk through the city's fleshpots in a noble crusade against vice, modernity and ignorance. But his momma has a nasty surprise in store for him: Ignatius must get a job. Undaunted, he uses his new-found employment to further his mission.

The Cleverley family live a gilded life, little realising how precarious their privilege is, just one tweet away from disaster. George, the patriarch, is a stalwart of television interviewing, a 'national treasure' (his words); his wife, Beverley, a celebrated novelist; and their children, Nelson, Elizabeth, Achilles, various degrees of catastrophe waiting to happen. Together they will go on a journey of discovery through the Hogarthian jungle of the modern living where past presumptions count for nothing and carefully curated reputations can be destroyed in an instant.

It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong? Our narrator has many of the advantages of life: young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, she lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like everything else, by her inheritance. But there is a vacuum at the heart of things, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents in college, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her alleged best friend.

The Drones club's in peril. Gussie's in love. Spode's on the warpath. Oh, and His Majesty's Government needs a favour. From the mean streets of Mayfair to the scheming spires of Cambridge we encounter a joyous cast of characters: chiselling painters and criminal bookies, eccentric philosophers and dodgy clairvoyants, appalling poets and pocket dictators, vexatious aunts and their vicious hounds. Replete with a Times crossword and classic Schottian endnotes, you have access to the most blissfully entertaining means to while away an idle hour.

Our narrator produces a sound from the piano no one else at the Conservatory can. She employs a technique she learned from her parents—also talented musicians—who fled China in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. But when an accident leaves her parents debilitated, she abandons her future for a job at a high-end beauty and wellness store in New York City.

Life as a stay-in-bed husband turned out to be a lot more complicated than I expected. My wife was pregnant with a baby that possibly wasn't mine. My old man was engaged in a war with the feminist movement that he was never going to win. And my old dear was making a lot of unexplained trips to Russia. Throw into the mix an eldest son with a possible sex addiction and three infant sons who were so thick they made me look like Edward Einstein.

If you can count on one thing from "Madea" Mabel Simmons, star of Diary of a Mad Black Woman and Madea's Family Reunion, it's that she's got something to say. She's the beloved, hilarious, sharp-witted, pistol-packing grandmother who's watching out and speaking her mind. Now Madea is telling her own story, dishing her memoirs and hard-won, hilarious wisdom in her own inimitable voice (with a little help from her friend Tyler Perry).

Chichikov, a mysterious stranger, arrives in the provincial town of 'N', visiting a succession of landowners and making each a strange offer. He proposes to buy the names of dead serfs still registered on the census, saving their owners from paying tax on them, and to use these 'dead souls' as collateral to re-invent himself as a aristocrat. In this ebullient picaresque masterpiece, Gogol created a grotesque gallery of human types, from the bear-like Sobakevich to the insubstantial fool Manilov and, above all, the devilish con man Chichikov.

Two husbands secretly agree to a night of passion - with each other's wives; a slighted old man takes an elaborate and chilling revenge on his tormentor; a sculpture comes between a scheming wife and her put-upon husband.... Lust highlights a domestic familiarity always on the edge of something much, much darker.

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.

Bruce Chatwin's best-selling novel traces the fortunes of the enigmatic and unconventional hero, Kaspar Utz. Despite the restrictions of Cold War Czechoslovakia, Utz asserts his individuality through his devotion to his precious collection of Meissen porcelain. Although Utz is permitted to leave the country each year, and considers defecting each time, he is not allowed to take his porcelain with him and so he always returns to his Czech home, a prisoner both of the Communist state and of his collection.

Jake Richardson, an Oxford don nearing 60 with a lifetime's lechery behind him, is in pursuit of his lost libido and heads off to the consulting room of a miniature sex therapist. Not one to disobey a doctor's orders, he runs the full humiliating gamut of sex labs and trendy 'workshops', where more than souls are bared. He decks himself with cunning gadgetry, dreams up a weekly fantasy, pets diligently with his overweight wife and browses listlessly through porn magazines behind locked doors.