In the middle, meanwhile, are The Great Switcheroo and The Last Act, two stories exploring a darker side of desire and pleasure.In the black comedies of Switch Bitch Roald Dahl brilliantly captures the ins and outs, highs and lows of sex.'Dahl is too good a storyteller to become predictable' Daily TelegraphRoald Dahl, the brilliant and worldwide acclaimed author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, and many more classics for children, also wrote scores of short stories for adults. These delightfully disturbing tales have often been filmed and were most recently the inspiration for the West End play, Roald Dahl's Twisted Tales by Jeremy Dyson. Roald Dahl's stories continue to make readers shiver today.

    "Queen Lucia" was published in 1920, "Miss Mapp" in 1922 and "Lucia in London" in 1927. They are much-loved novels of provincial snobbery and became a successful television series.

    The Chromicles comprise all five of the immensely popular series of comic novels consisting of ‘The Darling Buds of May’ (1958), ‘A Breath of French Air’ (1959), ‘When the Green Woods Laugh’ (1960), ‘Oh! To Be in England’ (1963), and ‘A Little of What You Fancy’ (1970). Bates, speaking of how he was inspired to create the Larkin family, recalled the real junkyard that he often passed near his home in Kent; and he remembered seeing a family -- a father, mother and many children, sucking at ice-creams and eating crisps in a "ramshackle lorry that had been recently painted a violent electric blue". He tried writing a brief tale based on the family, but soon decided that he couldn’t waste such a rich gallery of characters to a short story." Pop is a wonderful character who hates pomp, pretension and humbug; loves his family, but doesn’t hesitate to break a few rules... and his and the Larkins' secret is “that they live as many of us would like to live if only we had the guts and nerve to flout the conventions."

    Here, a universal ranking system determines the social advantages and career opportunities of every member of society. An automated matchmaking service knows the best partners for everyone and helps with the break up when your ideal match (frequently) changes. And the foolproof algorithms of the biggest, most successful company in the world, TheShop, know what you want before you do and conveniently deliver to your doorstep before you even order it.In QualityCity, Peter Jobless is a machine scrapper who can't quite bring himself to destroy the imperfect machines sent his way, and has become the unwitting leader of a band of robotic misfits hidden in his home and workplace. One day, Peter receives a product from TheShop he absolutely, positively knows he does not want, and which he decides, at great personal cost, to return. The only problem: doing so means proving the perfect algorithm of TheShop wrong, calling into question the very foundations of QualityLand itself.

    Adolf Hitler wakes up from a 66-year sleep in his subterranean Berlin bunker to find the Germany he knew entirely changed: Internet-driven media spreads ideas in minutes and fumes celebrity obsession; immigration has produced multicultural neighborhoods bringing together people of varying race, ethnicity, and religion; and the most powerful person in government is a woman. Hitler is immediately recognized . . . as an impersonator of uncommon skill. The public assumes the fulminating leader of the Nazi party is a performer who is always in character, and soon his inevitable viral appeal begets YouTube stardom, begets television celebrity on a Turkish-born comedian's show. His bigoted rants are mistaken for a theatrical satire--exposing prejudice and misrepresentation--and his media success emboldens Hitler to start his own political party and set the country he finds a shambles back to rights. With daring and dark humor, Look Who's Back skewers the absurdity and depravity of the cult of personality in modern media culture.

    Because once you hand over your life to the dice, anything can happen. Entertaining, humorous, scary, shocking, subversive, The Dice Man is one of the cult bestsellers of our time.

    Cross keeps a tally of residents' deaths, and Mrs. Bellamy decides she can't take it any more and slits her throat. Meanwhile, two newcomers also cause disturbance, as hidden pasts, unusual sexual preferences, and wickedly dark humor are mixed to delicious effect.

    This former bank manager helped them transform three million dollars - stolen from bookies by a gang of robbers - into a rescue package for their dying town.But now the day of reckoning has come.The crims want the money.The cops want the money.A rogue insurance investigator wants the money.And so do Australia's two most notorious hit men.In trying to save his town, Lambert is forced to risk everything - his life, the lives of the town folk, his own daughter, ten thousand barramundi and a really lovable Jack Russell.

    1973: industrial strikes, bad pop music, corrosive class warfare, adolescent angst, IRA bombings. Four friends: a class clown who stoops very low for a laugh; a confused artist enthralled by guitar rock; an earnest radical with socialist leanings; and a quiet dreamer obsessed with poetry, God, and the prettiest girl in school. As the world appears to self-destruct around them, they hold together to navigate the choppy waters of a decidedly ambiguous decade.

    From a harrowingly cheerless childhood in Germany through acne-riddled high school years and his adolescent discoveries of alcohol, women, and the Los Angeles Public Library's collection of D. H. Lawrence, "Ham on Rye" offers a crude, brutal, and savagely funny portrait of an outcast's coming-of-age during the desperate days of the Great Depression.

    WATT was the beginning of Samuel Becket's post-war literary career, the fruition of the years in hiding in the Vaucluse mountains from the Gestapo, which also largely inspired WAITING FOR GODOT. But it remains, unlike the work that followed it, extremely Irish, a philosophical novel full of the grim humour that was already his trade-mark in such earlier fictions as MORE PRICKS THAN KICKS and MURPHY. The perambulations of WATT, especially in the home of the eccentric Mr. Knott, and the sketching of logic to elicit meaning, must be among the most comic inventions of modern literature. First published by the libertine Olympia Press in 1953, it has established itself as one of the most quoted and best-loved of Becket's novels. The typographical oddities and omissions are as Beckett left the text.

    At the center of the tale is Danny, whose house, like Arthur's castle, becomes a gathering place for men looking for adventure, camaraderie, and a sense of belonging. These "knights" are paisanos, men of mixed heritage, whose ancestors settled California hundreds of years before. Free of ties to jobs and other complications of the American way of life, they fiercely resist the corrupting tide of honest toil in the surrounding ocean of civil rectitude.As Steinbeck chronicles their deeds--their multiple loves, their wonderful brawls, their Rabelaisian wine-drinking--he spins a tale as compelling and ultimately as touched by sorrow as the famous legends of the Round Table, which inspired him.

    Like a streetlamp without a bulb or a goose at the onset of Christmas time.Anyroad, I thought I'd pen a few lines to someone who'd understand...It's 1991. Raymond Marks is a normal boy, from a normal family, in a normal northern town. Only lately, he's been feeling dead down. His dad left home after falling in love with a five-string banjo. His fun-hating grandma believes she should have married Jean-Paul Sartre: 'I could never read his books, but y' could tell from his picture, there was nothing frivolous about John-Paul Sartre.' Felonious Uncle Jason and Appalling Aunty Paula are lusting after the satellite dish.And so he turns to the one person who'll understand what he's going through: Morrissey. Told through a series of heartfelt letters to the frontman of The Smiths, this is a laugh-out-loud funny, incredibly poignant tale from a character you can't help but love.'Big-hearted, wonderfully funny and engrossing' THE MIRROR'A warm, funny, poignant story. I loved The Wrong Boy - and so will you' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH'A comic masterpiece' BEL MOONEY, MAIL ON SUNDAY

    Straightforward and simple. Everyone in their places, getting along, going along...Until everything goes wrong.When it does, Gillian, Stuart and Oliver decide that it's time to talk it all over. Because although they'd all agree that the orderliness of their lives has suddenly mutated into chaos - the alarming fluctuations of love being the chief culprit - that's about all they'd agree on ("One bit of information and people are immediately off into their theories," says Stuart, a bit pedantically). And each of them is determined to be heard.What we hear are three wonderfully realized voices telling three wildly different versions of one story - presenting the protean facts of disintegrating and escalating affections, laying blame, taking blame, talking about themselves, about each other, across each other, behind each other's backs, all in an attempt to get at the endlessly elusive truth. And what they reveal is the sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartrending process of selective memory that deeply colors the (more or less) fine art of eyewitnessing.Once again, the brilliant author of "Flaubert's Parrot", "Staring at the Sun" and "A History of the World in 10-and-1/2 Chapters" gives us a dazzling work of imagination: witty, wry, playful and, in the end, honed to a razor-sharp emotional edge.

    As an outrageously funny spoof about the ascent of a 40,000-and-a-half-foot peak, many thought it inspired by the 1953 conquest of Everest. But Bowman had drawn on the flavour and tone of earlier adventures, of Bill Tilman and his 1937 account of the Nandi Devi expedition. The book's central and unforgettable character, Binder, is one of the finest creations in comic literature.