1965.  War's found himself deep in the glamorous yet lethal world of international espionage. Unhappy with both the treachery and restrictive dress-code, when a name from the past reappears in his life War realises he must risk everything to keep the world safe once again. This short story follows on from the How To Be Dead series and continues the tale of everybody's favourite grumpy Horseman of the Apocalypse...  What Amazon readers are saying about the How To Be Dead Comedy Fantasy Series: ★★★★★ “Dave Turner is a funny man and ‘How To Be Dead’ is a brilliant read.”★★★★★ “If Neil Gaiman and Simon Pegg sat down to write a story together they might come up with something like this.”★★★★★ “Hilarious and unexpectedly moving.”★★★★★ "Laughs and excitement combined!"★★★★★ “Laugh out loud funny… It’s been a while since an author has made me laugh more than Pratchett does.”★★★★★ "If you like Tom Holt, Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett, Dave Turner's books will fit perfectly into your collection."

    This book wouldn't elevate a cow. I cannot conscientiously recommend it for any useful purposes whatever. All I can suggest is that when you get tired of reading 'the best hundred books, ' you may take this up for half an hour. It will be a change." (from the Preface to "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow by Jerome Jerome)

    . .It’s 1981. Eleven-year-old Sadie adores her beautiful and vibrant mother, Connie, whose dreams of making it big as a singer fill their tiny house in Leeds. It’s always been just the two of them. Until the unthinkable happens.Jean hasn’t seen her good-for-nothing daughter Connie since she ran away from the family home in Harlow – or Pram Town as its inhabitants affectionately call it – aged seventeen and pregnant.But in the wake of the Royal Wedding, Jean gets a life-changing call: could she please come and collect the granddaughter she’s never met?We all know how Charles and Diana turned out, and Jean and Sadie are hardly a match made in heaven – but is there hope of a happy ending for them?Written in Joanna Nadin’s trademark dazzling prose, The Talk of Pram Town tells the story of three generations of Earnshaws and asks whether it always has to be like mother, like daughter . .

    Now, appearing simultaneously with his first new novel in six years, Drury's debut is back in print.Welcome to Grouse County — a fictional Midwest that is at once familiar and amusingly eccentric — where a thief vacuums the church before stealing the chalice, a lonely woman paints her toenails in a drafty farmhouse, and a sleepless man watches his restless bride scatter their bills beneath the stars. At the heart of The End of Vandalism is an unforgettable love triangle set off by a crime: Sheriff Dan Norman arrests Tiny Darling for vandalizing an anti–vandalism dance and then marries the culprit's ex-wife Louise. So Tiny loses Louise, Louise loses her sense of self, and the three find themselves on an epic journey.At turns hilarious and heart-breaking, The End of Vandalism is a radiant novel about the beauty and ache of modern life.

    Unapologetic. Older - but arguably not wiser - Lancaster gets back to basics in this hilarious essay collection about everything from taking community policing classes to accidentally getting stoned with her waiter after a fancy dinner. These are the tales she'd tell if she met you in a bar... if she weren't too lazy to put on pants and go to a bar. Offering advice ranging from how to remain happily married to a man who refuses to blow his damn nose already to not creating An Incident at the cheese counter during an attempt at Whole30, she's you, only louder. As she details the chaos that will surely ensue if she has to learn to operate one more television remote control, you'll want to settle in and pour yourself a tall one. Because what's more fun than hearing a friend share her favorite stories?

    Collected here from various sources (including the Guardian and GQ America) are the best of his adventures. Always intrigued by our ability to believe the unbelievable, Jon meets the man preparing to welcome the aliens to earth, the woman trying to build a fully-conscious robotic replica of the love of her life and the Deal or No Deal contestants with a fool proof system to beat the Banker. Jon realises that it’s possible for our madness to be a force for good when he meets America’s real-life superheroes or a force for evil when he meets the Reverend ‘Death’ George Exoo, who has dubiously assisted in more than a hundred mercy killings.He goes to a UFO convention in the Nevada desert with Robbie Williams, asks Insane Clown Posse (who are possibly America’s nastiest rappers) whether it’s true they’ve actually been evangelical Christians all along and rummages through the extensive archives of Stanley Kubrick. Frequently hilarious, sometimes disturbing, always entertaining, these compelling encounters with people on the edge of madness will have you wondering just what we’re capable of.

    But that’s exactly the predicament Darla McAdams finds herself in. With practically the entire town of Tishomingo, Oklahoma, in attendance, the last place she wants to be is at her grandparents’ 60th wedding anniversary party with the whole family, her fiancé and her old flame all in the same room. Darla’s grandmother Roxie has seen many a bride tested, and she knows Darla is at a crossroads. It’s time to share the truth about Roxie’s own marriage to Darla’s grandfather - and the gift that saved their marriage so many years ago. By revealing secret after secret, the most startling involving a television set, Roxie gives Darla a wedding gift she’ll cherish forever, but only Darla can listen to what’s inside her heart and know who she’s meant to say “I do” to.

    Armed with wit, a pencil-thin mustache, and a cardboard sign that reads "I’m Not Psycho," he hitchhikes across America from Baltimore to San Francisco, braving lonely roads and treacherous drivers. But who should we be more worried about, the delicate film director with genteel manners or the unsuspecting travelers transporting the Pope of Trash?Before he leaves for this bizarre adventure, Waters fantasizes about the best and worst possible scenarios: a friendly drug dealer hands over piles of cash to finance films with no questions asked, a demolition-derby driver makes a filthy sexual request in the middle of a race, a gun-toting drunk terrorizes and holds him hostage, and a Kansas vice squad entraps and throws him in jail. So what really happens when this cult legend sticks out his thumb and faces the open road?

    Everything Mark's not, Paris is a man of the world with a thirst for adventure - even his name is better than Mark's.But after a catastrophic argument, Mark finds himself setting off alone on his voyage, instead emailing an unresponsive Paris from the road. A cocktail cruise on the Seine, mindful pastry making in Foix, a graffiti tour in Barcelona: Mark will be forced to engage with life and strangers as he never has before, with poignantly recognisable results.But questions remain: will he ever be able to have an authentic interaction? Will Paris ever reply to his emails? And crucially, will he manage to write SEO friendly copy for every place he visits?After all, it's not the destination that counts: it's the homes and experiences you encounter along the way.

    In each of these people the woman finds a common need: the urge to talk about themselves and to have an audience to their experiences. The narrator orchestrates this chorus of voices for the most part as a passive listener, until one of them makes an extraordinary request, drawing her into an intense and transformative experience of her own.In What Are You Going Through, Nunez brings wisdom, humor, and insight to a novel about human connection and the changing nature of relationships in our times. A surprising story about empathy and the unusual ways one person can help another through hardship, her book offers a moving and provocative portrait of the way we live now.

    The anonymous author has encountered lavish drug parties, gorgeous call girls, naked guests falling out of windows, $9,000 bottles of wine, astronomical telephone porn bills, bathtubs of Evian, and on more than one occasion, dead sheep. And every dirty word of it is true.This is a trawl through the decadence and debauchery of the ultimate service industry--where money not only talks, but gets guests the best room, the best service, and also entitles them to behave in any way they please.

    If she sometimes suspects there might be more to life than reading, she just shrugs and picks up a new book. When the father Nina never knew existed suddenly dies, leaving behind innumerable sisters, brothers, nieces, and nephews, Nina is horrified. They all live close by! They're all—or mostly all—excited to meet her! She'll have to Speak. To. Strangers. It's a disaster! And as if that wasn't enough, Tom, her trivia nemesis, has turned out to be cute, funny, and deeply interested in getting to know her. Doesn't he realize what a terrible idea that is?Nina considers her options.1. Completely change her name and appearance. (Too drastic, plus she likes her hair.) 2. Flee to a deserted island. (Hard pass, see: coffee). 3. Hide in a corner of her apartment and rock back and forth. (Already doing it.)It's time for Nina to come out of her comfortable shell, but she isn't convinced real life could ever live up to fiction. It's going to take a brand-new family, a persistent suitor, and the combined effects of ice cream and trivia to make her turn her own fresh page.

    To start anew. But it isn’t quite working out that way for Kugel…His ailing mother stubbornly holds on to life, and won’t stop reminiscing about the Nazi concentration camps she never actually suffered through. To complicate matters further, some lunatic is burning down farmhouses just like the one Kugel bought, and when, one night, he discovers history—a living, breathing, thought-to-be-dead specimen of history—hiding upstairs in his attic, bad quickly becomes worse.Hope: A Tragedy is a hilarious and haunting examination of the burdens and abuse of history, propelled with unstoppable rhythm and filled with existential musings and mordant wit. It is a comic and compelling story of the hopeless longing to be free of those pasts that haunt our every present.

    In this insightful and funny collection of personal stories Vowell—widely hailed for her inimitable stories on public radio's This American Life—ponders a number of curious questions: Why is she happiest when visiting the sites of bloody struggles like Salem or Gettysburg? Why do people always inappropriately compare themselves to Rosa Parks? Why is a bad life in sunny California so much worse than a bad life anywhere else? What is it about the Zen of foul shots? And, in the title piece, why must doubt and internal arguments haunt the sleepless nights of the true patriot? Her essays confront a wide range of subjects, themes, icons, and historical moments: Ike, Teddy Roosevelt, and Bill Clinton; Canadian Mounties and German filmmakers; Tom Cruise and Buffy the Vampire Slayer; twins and nerds; the Gettysburg Address, the State of the Union, and George W. Bush's inauguration.The result is a teeming and engrossing book, capturing Vowell's memorable wit and her keen social commentary.

    C. Boyle is known as one of our greatest American novelists, he is also an acknowledged master of the short story. In The Relive Box, his first collection following two hugely influential collected volumes, Boyle’s crackling wit and thematic range combine with a penetrating social consciousness to produce his trademark “inventive and often crushingly comic” (NPR) short fiction.From the title story, featuring a so-called relive box that allows users to experience anew almost any moment from their past, to “The Five-Pound Burrito,” the tale of a man aiming to build the biggest burrito in town, the twelve stories in this collection represent a whole new way of looking at the world from one of the best storytellers at work today. The Relive Box is an exuberant, linguistically dazzling book from someone the Boston Globe has said is “such a good storyteller it will probably take, as in Alice Munro’s case, the Nobel Prize or retirement for us to realize what tremendous talent has lain right in front of our noses.”