Showing titles in Absurdist

I am having problems relating to my crew member, having never been a great fan of cats, nor they of birds. Why have we been press ganged into service together? What can they hope to achieve by sending this absurd duo out to sea? I am an owl. The Cat is a cat... In Pea Green Boat, Stewart Lee and...

The long-awaited sequel to Jasper Fforde's cult bestseller Shades of Grey, set in world where social hierarchy revolves entirely around visual colour. Imagine a world where your position in society depended on what bit of the colour spectrum you could see. This is the world inhabited by Eddie...

Hundreds of years in the future, after the Something that Happened, the world is an alarmingly different place. Life is lived according to The Rulebook and social hierarchy is determined by your perception of colour. Eddie Russett is an above average Red who dreams of moving up the ladder by...

It is a time of unrest in the BookWorld. Only the diplomatic skills of ace literary detective Thursday Next can avert a devastating genre war. But a week before the peace talks, Thursday vanishes. Has she simply returned home to the RealWorld or is this something more sinister? All is not yet...

Fourteen years after her last adventure, Thursday Next, literary detective, finds herself in an unusual situation her job policing the fictional characters of the BookWorld has been downgraded since her previous escapades are now themselves in print. However, a pressing threat may call her back...

There is another 1985, somewhere in the could-have-been, where the Crimean war still rages, dodos are regenerated in home-cloning kits and everyone is deeply disappointed by the ending of 'Jane Eyre'. In this world there are no jet-liners or computers, but there are policemen who can travel...

'A writer of virtuostic talents who can seemingly do anything' New York Times 'Wallace is a superb comedian of culture . . . his exuberance and intellectual impishness are a delight' James Wood, Guardian 'He induces the kind of laughter which, when read in bed with a sleeping partner, wakes said...

Brought to you by Penguin. THE AMAZING NEW NOVEL FROM CURTIS SITTENFELD: 'A rollercoaster of modern love and dating' STYLIST 'One of my all-time favourite authors. A brilliantly written, funny page-turner, I want to read it all again' PANDORA SYKES A TV script writer thinks she's over romance...

WINNER OF THE ARTHUR C CLARKE AWARD Out on the road, no one speaks, everything talks. Hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, and allergic to bullshit, Jean is not your usual grandma. She’s never been good at getting on with other humans, apart from her beloved granddaughter, Kimberly. Instead, she...

When the trucks stop rolling, a retired pharmacist knows what comes next.Marty has spent forty years behind a pharmacy counter and a lifetime preparing for the day the official story falls apart. So when a virus out of Wuhan empties the roads and the airwaves fill with round-the-clock panic, he...

Ever feel like the whole world is conspiring against you? Jonathon Fairfax can’t even get on the London Underground without bumping into someone he’s desperate to avoid – like Rachel, his first love, who demolished his heart eleven years ago. She tells him that her terrifying uncle (a man...

Combine an offbeat cast of characters with Murakami's idiosyncratic prose and the result is the remarkable story, Dance Dance Dance: high-class call girls billed to Mastercard, a psychic 13-year-old dropout has a passion for talking heads, and meet a hunky matinee idol, doomed to play dentists...

Andrew Prince has been walking the earth for longer than he can remember, watching civilizations rise, fall, and fade into dust. These days, he keeps a low profile, running a high-powered security firm with two trusted allies. But when a job goes wrong and an old name resurfaces, Andrew is pulled into a dangerous game that spans centuries. Enemies long thought gone are moving in the shadows. Secrets from lives he's tried to forget are clawing their way back to the surface. Immortality has its advantages. It also has a body count.

Ethan Essig wakes up every morning disappointed to find he’s still himself—a bitter, burnt-out pornographer running a company on the brink of collapse with a soul teetering on the edge of immolation. Over the course of one surreal week, Ethan will gamble everything on salvation: paging through the Awesome Bible (the Bible, but awesomer), seeking redemption from a Baptist pastor, and trading insults with a foul-mouthed portrait of Jesus himself.

Brought to you by Penguin. A dizzying short story collection that displays Murakami's genius for uncovering the surreal in the everyday, the extraordinary within the ordinary *Featuring the story 'Barn Burning', the inspiration behind the Palme d'Or nominated film Burning* When a man's favourite...

Alexei Sayle stars in this comical story of Britain's first Communist football team A secret descendant of Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, Ricky Lenin is a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist, fervently committed to overthrowing the decadent world of British football. As a midfield maestro, he's perfectly...

The English-language debut of Hiroko Oyamada—one of the most powerfully strange young voices in JapanThe English-language debut of one of Japan's most exciting new writers, The Factory follows three workers at a sprawling industrial factory. Each worker focuses intently on the specific task...

Ren lives alone on the remote frontier of a country devastated by a coup. High on the forested slopes, she survives by hunting and trading - and forgetting. But when a young soldier comes to the mountains in search of a legendary creature, Ren is inexorably drawn into an impossible mission. As...

Ein Blaubär entführt den Hörer in eine Welt, in der Phantasie und Humor auf abenteuerliche Weise außer Kontrolle geraten sind. Dem Hörer geht es in dieser akustischen Neufassung wie der Hauptfigur: Gepackt vom Sog der Lesung Dirk Bachs geht es über sparsam, aber effektvoll eingesetzte Musik zu Zwergpiraten, Klabautergeistern und Gimpeln. Dramatische Klangbilder machen die Reise so plastisch, dass Finsterberge, der Große Wald, der Ewige Tornado, Atlantis u.v.m.

Like Kafka's The Castle, Invitation to a Beheading embodies a vision of a bizarre and irrational world. In an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for "gnostical turpitude", an imaginary crime that defies definition.