Showing titles in Absurdist

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...

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...

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 and teachers. Don’t forget the one-armed beach-combing poet, an uptight hotel clerk and one very bemused narrator caught in the web of advanced capitalist mayhem.

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...

With the shadow of the Flayed Monarch looming ever closer, Dan must prepare the store and himself for the battle to come. To stand a chance, he’ll need to expand his operations, broker a precarious trade deal with the Delvers of Howlers Hold, and transform his stash of relics into an arsenal of magical war crimes.

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...

Winner of the Locus Award and CIBA Mark Twain grand prize, The Man Who Saw Seconds is a gripping speculative fiction thriller, blending absurdist satire and adrenaline-charged suspense, about a New York man who can see five seconds into the future—which changes his life forever; perfect for...

Everyday Absurdities is a collection of short stories by author M. von Lindenberg. This book is bad, and it's not meant to make you happy. In fact, it would please the author to no end to know that you threw it in the trash after the introduction. If you manage to actually listen this god-awful thing, you should seek psychiatric advice. Note: there will be no mention of The Noodle Incident herein.

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...

Surprise, you’re dead! This hilarious and moving novel follows a couple forced into unthinkable challenges when, after dying in a plane crash, they find themselves in the lowest tier of heaven, filled with laughter and dread, fear and acceptance, and family bonds even death can't break...

The World of HR is a very... delicate subject. Dealing with people is the hardest thing in life. This HR lady has enough of her employees drama and goes on the HR Lady Massacre. A humorous twist on employer discipline.

For Jim Nashe, it all started when he came into a small inheritance and left Boston in pursuit of a "life of freedom." Careening back and forth across the United States, waiting for the money to run out, Nashe met Jack Pozzi, a young man with a temper and a plan. With Nashe's last funds, they entered a poker game against two rich eccentrics, "risking everything on the single blind turn of a card."

B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, neurotic and underappreciated film critic (failed academic, filmmaker, paramour, shoe salesman who sleeps in a sock drawer), stumbles upon a hitherto unseen film by an enigmatic outsider - a film he’s convinced will change his career trajectory and rock the world of cinema to its core. His hands on what is possibly the greatest movie ever made, a three-month-long stop-motion masterpiece that took its reclusive auteur 90 years to complete, B. knows that it is his mission to show it to the rest of humanity. 

Richard Brautigan's world is one of gentle magic and marvelous laughter, of the incredibly beautiful and the beautifully incredible. Trout Fishing in America is a pseudonym for the miraculous. A journey that begins at the foot of the Benjamin Franklin statue in San Francisco's Washington Square, that wanders through the wonders of America's rural waterways, and that ends, inevitably, with mayonnaise. Funny, wild, and sweet, Trout Fishing in America is an incomparable guidebook to the delights of exploration.

Nightshift clerk and high-functioning insomniac Jack is back to work, trying his best to keep out of trouble. But when his chain-smoking coworker discovers a mysterious radio signal revealing the guarded secrets of their town, Jack will learn that an annoying new dayshift manager is far from the worst of his problems. In this second installment of the Gas Station saga, Jack finds himself entangled in his most harrowing adventure yet.

Jasper Fforde's cult bestseller, re-recorded to celebrate the publication of the long-awaited sequel RED SIDE STORY. Imagine a black and white world where colour is a commodity . . . It is a world invented by comic and creative genius - and Number One bestseller - Jasper Fforde. Hundreds of...

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...

A member of the landed gentry, with a seemingly guaranteed income from his estate in the country, Oblomov lives in Petersburg, uninterested in the business that provides his living and barely aware that the revenue is diminishing. Not that he leads a dissolute life of extravagance, balls and entertainment. Instead he is a dreamer, a sybarite, content above all to spend most of the day supine, in bed. The novel opens with Oblomov thus ensconced, attended only by his dirty, grumbling, indolent servant Zahar, who has looked after him since childhood, catering to his every need. 

I Am Not Sidney Poitier is a comic tour de force from the Pulitzer Prize-winning, twice Booker Prize-shortlisted author of James and Erasure. The sudden death of Not Sidney Poitier’s mother orphans him at age eleven. He is left with a name no one understands, an uncanny resemblance to an...

* LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025 * * WINNER OF THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2026 * * SHORTLISTED FOR THE CLIMATE FICTION PRIZE * * WINNER OF THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE * * WINNER OF THE ATWOOD GIBSON WRITERS' TRUST FICTION PRIZE * * A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: GUARDIAN, OBSERVER, IRISH TIMES...

Amane is ten years old when she discovers she's not like everyone else. Her school friends were all conceived the normal way, by artificial insemination, and raised in the normal way, by parents in 'clean', sexless marriages. But Amane's parents committed the ultimate taboo: they fell in love, had sex and procreated. As Amane grows up and enters adulthood, she does her best to fit in and live her life like the rest of society: cultivating intense relationships with anime characters, and limiting herself to extra-marital sex, as is the norm.

When a man's favourite elephant vanishes, the balance of his whole life is subtly upset. A couple's midnight hunger pangs drive them to hold up a McDonald's. A woman finds she is irresistible to a small green monster that burrows through her front garden. An insomniac wife wakes up in a twilight world of semi-consciousness in which anything seems possible - even death. In every one of these stories Murakami makes a determined assault on the normal.

Bloomsbury presents Will There Ever Be Another You, written and read by Patricia Lockwood THE NEW NOVEL FROM THE AUTHOR OF NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS WINNER OF THE DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE AND THE ONLY BOOK SHORTLISTED FOR BOTH THE 2021 BOOKER PRIZE AND WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION The world might be...

The Metamorphosis tells the unsettling story of Gregor Samsa’s transformation into something entirely unexpected: “a monstrous insect.” This is not just a novel about physical transformation but also a deep reflection on alienation and loneliness. The listener will not only to enjoy Kafka’s incomparable style but also to confront the vital questions that only a masterpiece can provoke.

Life is so unfair, and it sends many things to try Professor Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, author of Portuguese Irregular Verbs and pillar of the Institute of Romance Philology in the proud Bavarian city of Regensburg. There is the undeserved rise of his rival (and owner of a one-legged...

THE NUMBER ONE BESTSELLING AUTHOR 'The Constant Rabbit is Jasper Fforde's most chilling and realistic book yet' Guardian 'You won't read anything quite like this in 2020 - or beyond that too' CultureFly *** England, 2020. There are 1.2 million human-sized rabbits living in the UK. They can walk...

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.

When a dispute over her parents’ will grows bitter, Bergljot is drawn back into the orbit of the family she fled 20 years before. Her mother and father have decided to leave two island summer houses to her sisters, disinheriting the two eldest siblings from the most meaningful part of the estate. To outsiders, it is a quarrel about property and favoritism. But Bergljot, who has borne a horrible secret since childhood, understands the gesture as something very different - a final attempt to suppress the truth and a cruel insult to the grievously injured.

Brought to you by Penguin. On the Six-Thousand Ship, things have started to feel changed. Since bringing aboard a number of strange objects from a newly discovered planet, the crew – both human and humanoid – have begun to feel a yearning. They want to be near the objects, to feel them...