Showing results by author "David Mitchell" in All Categories

Brought to you by Penguin. THE NO. 1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER Read by David Mitchell. A funny book about a serious subject, Unruly is for anyone who has ever wondered how we got here - and who is to blame. Think you know your kings and queens? Think again. Taking us right back to King Arthur...

Welcome to the inside-out world of Mitchell and Webb, a strange and surreal place populated by misfits, eccentrics, talking animals and a few stray Radio 4 arts programme presenters. Included here are all five series of their fantastically skewed comedy show, packed with offbeat sketches and peculiar characters. Meet seedy snooker commentators Ted and Peter; poorly matched crime-fighting duo Angel Summoner and BMX Bandit; a cop who doesn't get results but, by God, he does things by the book; and some nervous Nazis who've just noticed their caps have skulls on them.

David Mitchell, who you may know for his inappropriate anger on every TV panel show except Never Mind the Buzzcocks, his look of permanent discomfort on C4 sex comedy Peep Show, his online commenter-baiting in The Observer or just for wearing a stick-on moustache in That Mitchell and Webb Look, has written a book about his life.

Why is every film or tv programme a sequel or a remake? Why are people so f***ing hung up about swearing? Why do the asterisks in that sentence make it okay? Why do so many people want to stop other people doing things, and how can they be stopped from stopping them? These and many other questions trouble David Mitchell. Join him on a tour of the absurdities of modern life - from Ryanair to Richard III, Downton Abbey to phone etiquette, UKIP to hot dogs made of cats.

David Mitchell’s 2014 best seller Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse must really have made people think - because everything’s got worse. We’ve gone from UKIP surge to Brexit shambles, from horsemeat in lasagne to Donald Trump in the White House, from Woolworths going under to all the other shops going under. It’s probably socially irresponsible even to try to cheer up.

Thrilling adventures and hilarious capers from three brilliant children’s authors in one audiobook collection. That Time I Got Kidnapped. When 14-year-old Jacob misses his connecting flight in Chicago, he tries to complete his journey to LA by Greyhound bus. But on board he meets American teenager Jennifer, who is carrying a mysterious package and being chased by an enigmatic pursuer known only as ‘the Cowboy’...and she needs a partner in crime. The unlikely pair soon finds themselves on the road-trip of a lifetime - a funny, filmic, gripping adventure.

Over the course of the series, David eats his lunchtime sandwiches with children in a primary school and later goes to a street market to see manners - good and bad - in action. He explores where our manners come from with Professor Steven Pinker from Harvard University and the author Henry Hitchings. What do we mean by 'civility' and 'good manners' in public places? Why are people still pinching vicars' bottoms, and what can the state do to improve standards of public behaviour? And, David asks, how is the digital age changing our sense of public space?

In this fantastic follow-up to Behaving Ourselves: David Mitchell on Manners, the comedian and columnist turns his attention to meetings, examining our love/hate relationship with them and asking how we evolved from getting together for a 'thing' to shouting at each other via Zoom. On the agenda: David talks to fellow comedian Russell Kane about the different ways introverts and extroverts behave in meetings; meets Dutch sociologist Wilbert van Vree to sum up several millennia of meetings; and gets some tips from executive coach Sophie Bryan about being a good chairman.

Be transported to a place like no other: a tiny, man-made island in the bay of Nagasaki, for 200 years the sole gateway between Japan and the West. Here, in the dying days of the 18th century, a young Dutch clerk arrives to make his fortune. Instead he loses his heart. Step onto the streets of Dejima and mingle with scheming traders, spies, interpreters, servants and concubines as two cultures converge. In a tale of integrity and corruption, passion and power, the key is control - of riches and minds and over death itself.

Run away, one drowsy summer's afternoon, with Holly Sykes: wayward teenager, broken-hearted rebel and unwitting pawn in a titanic, hidden conflict. Over six decades, the consequences of a moment's impulse unfold, drawing an ordinary woman into a world far beyond her imagining. And as life in the near future turns perilous, the pledge she made to a stranger may become the key to her family's survival....

Utopia Avenue are the strangest British band you've never heard of. Emerging from London's psychedelic scene in 1967 and fronted by folksinger Elf Holloway, guitar demigod Jasper de Zoet and blues bassist Dean Moss, Utopia Avenue released only two LPs during its brief and blazing journey from the clubs of Soho and draughty ballrooms to Top of the Pops and the cusp of chart success, to glory in Amsterdam, prison in Rome and a fateful American fortnight in the autumn of 1968.

Without the TV censors knife, here is more comedy from the irascible team that put the smut back into TV. With the addition of Ed Byrne, Rhod Gilbert, and David Mitchell.

David Mitchell and Robert Webb offer you no less than the magic and wonder of the theatre. Yes, the roar of the greasepaint and the smell of the crowd has been captured in this however-many-times-you-think-about-buying-it-in-a-lifetime entertainment opportunity. A whole host (i.e., more than nine) of comic characters, from incompetent space heroes to alcoholic snooker commentators, from aspirant cricketers to deluded vagrants, are brought to life on the magnificence of the stage.

**Pre-order UTOPIA AVENUE, the spectacular new novel from David Mitchell.** Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2001 The second novel from the critically-acclaimed author of GHOSTWRITTEN and CLOUD ATLAS. As Eiji Miyake's twentieth birthday nears, he arrives in Tokyo with a mission - to locate the...

January, 1982. Thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor - covert stammerer and reluctant poet - anticipates a stultifying year in his backwater English village. But he hasn't reckoned with bullies, simmering family discord, the Falklands War, a threatened gypsy invasion and those mysterious entities known as girls. Charting 13 months in the black hole between childhood and adolescence, this is a captivating novel, wry, painful and vibrant with the stuff of life.

**Pre-order UTOPIA AVENUE, the spectacular new novel from David Mitchell.** Winner of the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. A magnificent achievement and an engrossing experience, David Mitchell's first novel announced the arrival of one of the most exciting writers of the twenty-first...

Cloud Atlas features six characters in interlocking stories, each interrupting the one before it: a reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan's California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; a genetically modified dinery server on death row; and Zachry, a young Pacific islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation.

Written by Naoki Higishida when he was only 13, this remarkable book explains the often baffling behaviour of autistic children and shows the way they think and feel - about the people around them, time and beauty, noise, and themselves. Naoki abundantly proves that autistic people do possess imagination, humour and empathy, but also makes clear, with great poignancy, how badly they need our compassion, patience and understanding.

Prepare to be chilled, electrified and entertained - a gem of a novel from 'one of the most brilliantly inventive writers of this, or any country' ( Independent). Walk down narrow, clammy Slade Alley. Open the black iron door in the right-hand wall. Enter the sunlit garden of an old house that doesn't exactly make sense. A stranger greets you by name and invites you inside. At first, you won't want to leave. Too late, you find you can't....

A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan's California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; a genetically modified 'dinery server' on death-row; and Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation....