Showing titles in Satire

Athena Liu is a literary darling and June Hayward is literally nobody. When Athena dies in a freak accident, June steals her unpublished manuscript and publishes it as her own under the ambiguous name Juniper Song. But as evidence threatens June’s stolen success, she will discover exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves. What happens next is entirely everyone else’s fault.

Kenneth Horne, Kenneth Williams, Betty Marsden and Hugh Paddick star in 20 episodes of the anarchic 1960s radio comedy. Round the Horne arrived on BBC radio in 1965, bringing laughter to Sunday lunchtimes throughout the land. It carved a niche in the history of broadcast comedy, a sketch show which prodded the boundaries of propriety and innuendo.

It’s been an enjoyable and murder-free time for Judith, Suzie and Becks – AKA the Marlow Murder Club – since the events of last year. The most exciting thing on the horizon is the upcoming wedding of Marlow grandee, Sir Peter Bailey, to his nurse, Jenny Page. Sir Peter is having a party at his grand mansion on the river Thames the day before the wedding, and Judith and Co. are looking forward to a bit of free champagne.

What happens when a Prime Minister suddenly stops being Prime Minister? That's the question facing Henry Tobin—Britain's least popular, shortest-serving post-war PM, who's forced into retirement 30 years early after a bruising election defeat. But he's not going to let failure crush his spirits. Instead, he plans to pick himself up, repair his battered reputation and make his name in some other field—though he's not quite sure what that will be.

Lucas knows the perfect night entails just three things: video games, wine, and pad thai. Peanuts are a must! Other people? Not so much. Why complicate things when he’s happy alone? Then one day the apartment board, a vexing trio of authority, rings his doorbell. And Lucas’s solitude takes a startling hike. They demand to see his frying pan. Someone left one next to the recycling room overnight, and instead of removing the errant object, as Lucas suggests, they insist on finding the guilty party. But their plan backfires. Colossally.

In this radio reboot, Pete Baikie, Morwenna Banks, Moray Hunter, Gordon Kennedy, John Sparkes and Gus Beattie revisit some of their much-loved comic creations, and introduce some hilarious newcomers. We listen in on the meetings of the highly confused Stoneybridge Town Council; hear pearls of nonsense from Calum Gilhooley, Edinburgh's most boring man; and the Little Girl gives us her take on topics including Tonsils, Teenagers, The Truth and Time's Up.

Tender Branson - last surviving member of the so-called "Creedish Death Cult" - is dictating his incredible life story into the flight recorder of Flight 2039, cruising on autopilot at 39,000 feet somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. He is all alone in the plane, which will shortly reach terminal velocity and crash into the vast Australian outback.

Right Ho, Jeeves sees Bertie Wooster blithely attempting to assume the role of Jeeves himself as a matters-of-the-heart adviser. Very unwise: from Gussie Fink-Nottle's romance with Madeline Bassett, to Tuppy Glossop and his stop/go engagement to Angela Travers, the young master succeeds only in making a bally mess of everyone's love-lives.

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.

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.

Despite the title, Dickens's portrayal of early industrial society is less relentlessly grim than that in novels by contemporaries such as Elizabeth Gaskell or Charles Kingsley. Hard Times weaves the tale of Thomas Gradgrind, a hard-headed politician who raises his children Louisa and Tom without love and to have no empathy, their lives completely devoid of beauty, culture, or imagination. Only after a series of crises does their father realise that the manner in which he raised his children has ruined their lives.

'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....

Heads Will Roll is an Audible Original from Saturday Night Live star Kate McKinnon and her cocreator/costar (and real-life sister) Emily Lynne. Produced by Broadway Video, this is not an audiobook - it’s a 10-episode, star-studded audio comedy that features performances from Meryl Streep, Tim Gunn, Peter Dinklage, Queer Eye’s Fab Five, and so many more. Please note: This content is not for kids.

Driving with a donkey stuffed in the back seat; jackdaws pecking brains out through the roof of a confessional box; cat piss and astronauts. This is the world not as you see it, but as it is, twisted from the maverick mind of Blindboy Boatclub. These are stories of the strange unsettlings in the souls of men caught in between the past and the possible; stories of heart-blinding rage and disquieting compassion. Topographia Hibernica is a collection that unravels the knotted threads of humanity, nature and colonisation from a contemporary Irish perspective.

A delivery driver finds himself inside a world occupied by characters from unfinished novels and must accept he is not real. But the world around him doesn’t feel right, and when he starts asking questions, the authorities soon take extreme measures to stop him finding the truth about Fiction Land.

"I've experienced a whole lot the last few years and I have a lot to share. So I hope that you'll take a moment to sit back, relax and enjoy the words I've put together for you in this book. I think you'll find I've left no stone unturned, no door unopened, no window unbroken, no rug unvacuumed, no ivories untickled. What I'm saying is, let us begin, shall we?" (Ellen DeGeneres)

For years they thought it was just them. Irritated and tormented by everything around them from call centres to nose studs, from speed bumps to ring tones. Then along came the BBC2 series Grumpy Old Men, and the subsequent best-selling book, and they knew they were not alone.

A heartwarming tale of office life, homicide and biscuits, which was longlisted for the Bath Novel Award 2017. Jonathon Fairfax, the world’s most socially awkward hero, works for a giant corporation where he specialises in muttering ‘um’ and tripping over bins. When he accidentally discovers a colossal corporate conspiracy, it soon becomes clear that someone will do anything to keep it a secret - including murder.

Jeeves, not only a tireless servant to the feckless Bertie Wooster, is the saviour of a good many other individuals as well. The list is long: Bingo Little has cause to be grateful to Jeeves in the affair of the marooned cabinet minister; Sippy Sipperley, when he is persecuted by his former headmaster; Tuppy Glossop, in his foolhardy pursuit of Cora Bellinger the opera singer; not to mention Miss Dalgeish the dog-girl; Bertie's fat Uncle George when he brushes with the lower classes.

Freeloading freelancer Ed Reardon is back, and still trying to survive in a world where the media seems to be run by idiots and lying charlatans. Success continues to eludes him, but at least he can eke out a living teaching creative writing, condensing modern classics and doing a spot of celebrity ghostwriting.