Top Gear: The Alternative Highway Code


Ministry of Top Gear - 2010
    The right way, the wrong way and the Top Gear way. Although, on reflection, that's usually just the wrong way, but faster and with more shouting. Anyway, the good news is that this third way of doing things can be applied to almost anything, and that includes motoring in general. All you need is the right guidance, which is where the brand new Top Gear Alternative Highway Code comes in. Top Gear's Altnernative Highway Code will show you how to bring the ambitious but rubbish philosophies of the world's most popular TV programme to your driving, containing advice on general motoring, as well as specific tips on how to deal with common eventualities like a rapidly sinking amphibious camper van, a caravan airship that's just crashed into a small bush, or a stupid home-made limousine that's snapped in half while transporting a top celebrity to an awards ceremony.Road users should not leave home without it.

A Good Man in Africa


William Boyd - 1981
    His love of women, his fondness for drink, and his loathing for the country prove formidable obstacles on his road to any kind of success. But when he becomes an operative in Operation Kingpin and is charged with monitoring the front runner in Kinjanja’s national elections, Morgan senses an opportunity to achieve real professional recognition and, more importantly, reassignment.After he finds himself being blackmailed, diagnosed with a venereal disease, attempting bribery, and confounded with a dead body, Morgan realizes that very little is going according to plan.

The History Man


Malcolm Bradbury - 1975
    A self-appointed revolutionary hero, Howard always comes out on top. And Malcolm Bradbury dissects him in this savagely funny novel that has been universally acclaimed as one of the masterpieces of the decade.

High Rising


Angela Thirkell - 1933
    She also introduces us to specific characters as well as 'types' who will appear and reappear in changing relationships as the years go by. There is the middle-aged woman centrally involved in the events and activities around her; here, Laura Morland, a happily widowed author of very successful 'good bad books' (Thirkell herself?). A disappointed suitor and/or a brief, ill-conceived infatuation of younger man with older woman. At least two romances to work out—an older couple and a younger one—with mild crises along the way. A closing of ranks among the women vs the intruder nicknamed 'the Incubus' resolves both affairs to the satisfaction of all. Especially delightful are the children, servants and other retainers; well defined characters in their own right; from motor-mouthed young Tony Morland and his model railways to housekeeper Stoker and her grapevine among the servants of the neighbourhood.

The Best of Tagore


Rabindranath Tagore - 2004
    Kabuliwala2. The Parrot's Training3. The Rat's Feast4. Atonement5. The Nuisance6. Wish Fulfilment7. The Runaway8. Shiburam9. The Scientist10. The Invention of Shoes11. A 'Good' Man12. Return of the Little Master

The Virgin and the Gipsy & Other Stories


D.H. Lawrence - 1930
    In struggling to escape from their thwarted lives and to achieve human 'tenderness', the characters embody and continue the major preoccupations of Lawrence's work as a whole.Love Among the Haystacks provides an early illustration of the intensity and innovation which made Lawrence one of the most distinctive and important of twentieth-century writers.

The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling


Henry Fielding - 1749
    Allworthy on his country estate, Tom Jones is deeply in love with the seemingly unattainable Sophia Western, the beautiful daughter of the neighboring squire—though he sometimes succumbs to the charms of the local girls. When Tom is banished to make his own fortune and Sophia follows him to London to escape an arranged marriage, the adventure begins. A vivid Hogarthian panorama of eighteenth-century life, spiced with danger and intrigue, bawdy exuberance and good-natured authorial interjections, Tom Jones is one of the greatest and most ambitious comic novels in English literature.   • Includes a chronology, suggestions for further reading, notes, glossary, and an appendix of Fielding's revisions   • Introduction discusses narrative tecniques and themes, the context of eighteenth-century fiction and satire, and the historical and political background of the Jacobite revolutionFor more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Patrick Melrose Volume 1: Never Mind, Bad News and Some Hope


Edward St. Aubyn - 1994
    But the drugs don’t make him forget his past, and the glittering parties offer him no redemption . . . Searingly funny and deeply humane, Patrick Melrose Volume 1 contains the first three novels in the Patrick Melrose series, Never Mind, Bad News and Some Hope. Patrick Melrose Volume 2 is also available, containing the final two novels in the series, Mother’s Milk and At Last.

To Be or Not To Be: A Chooseable-Path Adventure


Ryan North - 2013
    Play as Hamlet, Ophelia, or King Hamlet--if you want to die on the first page and play as a ghost. It's pretty awesome! Readers can follow Yorick skull markers to stick closely to Shakespeare's plot, or go off-script and explore alternative possibilities filled with puzzles and humor.Each ending in the book is accompanied by a full-color, full-page illustration by one of the 65 most excellent artists working today, so each rereading yields new surprises and rewards. Ryan's prose is, as always, colloquial and familiar but full of clever references, vivid imagination, and only the most choice of jokes. Inventive devices like a book-within-a-book (to mirror Hamlet's play-within-a-play) take full advantage of the gamebook medium and liven up the original story for even the most disinterested of Shakespeare readers!To Be or Not to Be became a sensation when it launched: over 15,000 people backed the book in just one month, and it remains the number-one most funded publishing project ever on Kickstarter.com.To be, or not to be: that is the adventure!

The Teleportation Accident


Ned Beauman - 2012
    If you're living in Germany in the 1930s, it probably isn't. But that's no consolation to Egon Loeser, whose carnal misfortunes will push him from the experimental theatres of Berlin to the absinthe bars of Paris to the physics laboratories of Los Angeles, trying all the while to solve two mysteries: whether it was really a deal with Satan that claimed the life of his hero, the great Renaissance stage designer Adriano Lavicini; and why a handsome, clever, charming, modest guy like him can't, just once in a while, get himself laid. From the author of the acclaimed Boxer, Beetle comes a historical novel that doesn't know what year it is; a noir novel that turns all the lights on; a romance novel that arrives drunk to dinner; a science fiction novel that can't remember what 'isotope' means; a stunningly inventive, exceptionally funny, dangerously unsteady and (largely) coherent novel about sex, violence, space, time, and how the best way to deal with history is to ignore it. LET'S HOPE THE PARTY WAS WORTH IT

The Short Reign of Pippin IV


John Steinbeck - 1957
    Enchanting comedy ensues as Steinbeck creates the most hilarious royal court ever around the brief, bold reign of the corduroy-clad Pippin, his social-climbing wife Maria, his star-struck daughter Clotilde and her Californian beau, Todd.

Wish Her Safe at Home


Stephen Benatar - 1982
    Out of nowhere, a great-aunt leaves her a Georgian mansion in another city--and she sheds her old life without delay. Gone is her dull administrative job, her mousy wardrobe, her downer of a roommate. She will live as a woman of leisure, devoted to beauty, creativity, expression, and love. Once installed in her new quarters, Rachel plants a garden, takes up writing, and impresses everyone she meets with her extraordinary optimism. But as Rachel sings and jokes the days away, her new neighbors begin to wonder if she might be taking her transformation just a bit too far.In Wish Her Safe at Home, Stephen Benatar finds humor and horror in the shifting region between elation and mania. His heroine could be the next-door neighbor of the Beales of Grey Gardens or a sister to Jane Gardam's oddball protagonists, but she has an ebullient charm all her own.

A Year in the Merde


Stephen Clarke - 2004
    Based on Stephen Clarke's own experiences and with names changed to "avoid embarrassment, possible legal action, and to prevent the author's legs being broken by someone in a Yves Saint Laurent suit," A Year in the Merde provides perfect entertainment for Francophiles and Francophobes alike.

Blithe Spirit


Noël Coward - 1941
    Written in 1941, Blithe Spirit remained the longest-running comedy in British Theatre for years. Plotted around the central role of one of Coward's best loved characters, a medium Madame Arcati (originally played by Margaret Rutherford). Coward's play is a spirited charade about a man with 2 wives, one dead and another alive.

The Missionaries


Owen Stanley - 2016
    A brilliant tale of ineptitude, self-righteousness, and human folly, it combines the mordant wit of W. Somerset Maugham with a sense of humor reminiscent of P.G. Wodehouse.When Dr. Sydney Prout is named the head of the United Nations mission to Elephant Island, he believes he is more than ready to meet the challenge of guiding its primitive inhabitants into the post-Colonial era, and eventually, full independence. But neither his many academic credentials nor the Journal of Race Relations have prepared Dr. Prout to reckon with the unrepentant bloody-mindedness of the natives, or anticipate the inventive ways their tribal philosophers will incorporate the most unlikely aspects of modern civilization into their religious lore and traditional way of life.Author Owen Stanley is an Australian explorer, a philosopher, and a poet who speaks seven languages. He is at much at home in the remote jungles of the South Pacific as flying his Staudacher aerobatic plane, deep-sea diving, or translating the complete works of Charles Darwin into Tok Pisin.