Oliver Gurth Perkins is seventy-five, and the darkest cloud on his horizon is that the local bookshop no longer stocks paperbacks of the Times cryptic crosswords.
NEAR NEIGHBOURS introduces an eccentric world very like our own, peopled by characters who live for football, music and sex but who are also monopedes, cross-gender doppelgangers, window-fetishists or sock-throwers.
Take four ne'er-do-wells: a 28-year-old ex-public schoolboy who can't bear the idea of setting down; Suzy the Black Widow, who has a deliciously flat stomach and drives like she's breathing through the carbs; Brady the Reservoir Dogs fetishist; and Chico the fat Portuguese waiter.
Harry MacDonald had seen plenty of skulls - arsing about with some poor sod or other's skull is what pays Harry's rent - but until the day of his official thirty-ninth birthday (actually, Harry was knocking on forty), which was also the day he met Shnade again, he had never noticed the shape of his own skull-to-be; and until the night of that same day, he had never seen a living skull being crunched deliberately, wetly inwards.
Dumped by his activist girlfriend when he won t commit to her brand of idealism, reporter Scott Thomas sets out to prove his own dedication to do-gooding.
'One of the very best English comic novelists of the post-war era' Time OutThe plot lines of The Campus Trilogy, radiating from its hub at the redbrick University of Rummidge, trace the comic adventures of academics who move outside familiar territory.
In an attempt to escape his bizarre family and stagnation up North, tv soap-addict Alistair Strange moves to Fulham where he lands a job editing for a vanity publisher.
The White man in the Tree is a comedy of cultural misunderstanding set in the Caribbean, New York and Paris, a novella and eight stories about people who, because of their differences - between men and women, blacks and whites, Jews and Christians, rich and poor - misjudge each other.
Perfect for fans of Bridgerton, Georgette Heyer and Jenny Hambly, this scintillating page-turner from #1 New York Times bestselling author Johanna Lindsey is the perfect historical romance to settle down with.
The Sunday Times bestselling Richard & Judy Book Club favourite'Being Moran, the jokes and one-liners fizz and crackle off the page' Richard's Review'As usual, Moran writes fearlessly, openly, honestly and incredibly funnily about sex - especially bad sex' Judy's Review___________________________I'm Johanna Morrigan.
It is 1974 and Nicolas Kraven, lecturer in English Literature at Mosholu College in the Bronx, is adrift upon a sea of troubles: his affair with his neighbour's wife threatens to progress from Thursday night to permanence; his students are a mixture of campus revolutionaries, predatory sexual exhibitionists and an old man intent on proving Merlin was a Jew; an elderly academic specialist in Love, possessor of a devastatingly effective aphrodisiac and a libido that belies her years, has alarming designs on his person; the Kraven demons, a familial curse, are in hot pursuit; and a spectre from his past, the one man who can smash this already chaotic life into ruins, is expected imminently.
Elling has a wildly overactive imagination and has been molly-coddled by his mother all his life, so when she dies he is left completely incapable of taking care of himself.
The epic finale of the Latin American trilogy following The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts and Senor Vivo and the Coca LordWhile the economy of his small South American country collapses, President Veracruz joins his improbable populace of ex-soldiers, former guerrillas, unfrocked priests and reformed - though by no means inactive - whores, in a bizarre search for sexual fulfilment.
'Indisputably the definitive translation' Observer'If there is one novel you should read before you die, it is Don Quixote' Ben OkriWidely regarded as the world's first modern novel, and one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, Don Quixote chronicles the famous picaresque adventures of the noble knight-errant Don Quixote de La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain.
We should have awakened to the sun streaming in from across the valley, but this is not a story about things as they should be, and it was a dark blustery morning, blasting the blossom off the may.
Over the past 21 years Jilly Cooper has written a selection of best-selling books, mixing outrageous anecdotes from the lives of her family and friends with shrewd and wicked social satire and criticism.
Discovered in the secret compartment of a North Italian cabinet, this enchanting manuscript may or may not be complete, and it may or may not be intended for posterity.
