Showing titles in Dark Humour

Palahniuk’s fashion-model protagonist has it all - boyfriend, career, loyal best friend - until an accident destroys her face, her ability to speak, and her self-esteem. Enter Brandy Alexander, Queen Supreme, one operation away from becoming a bona fide woman.  

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Mother's Milk is the fourth of Edward St Aubyn's semi-autobiographical Patrick Melrose novels, adapted for TV for Sky Atlantic and starring Benedict Cumberbatch as aristocratic addict, Patrick. This audiobook edition is read by stage and screen actor Alex...

Every family has its secrets. But in this provocative horror debut, some families have: the Need. THE NEED is a rare genetic disorder. Those who have it must consume human flesh, or die. For some The Need is power. For others it is a curse. Talia's always been on the run with her two teenagers...

From the rubble-strewn streets of US-occupied Baghdad, the scavenger Hadi collects human body parts and stitches them together to create a corpse. His goal, he claims, is for the government to recognize the parts as people and give them a proper burial. But when the corpse goes missing, a wave...

Walter Starbuck, a career humanist and eventual low-level aide in the Nixon White House, is implicated in Watergate and jailed, after which he (like Howard Campbell in Mother Night) works on his memoirs. Starbuck is innocent (his office was used as a base for the Watergate shenanigans of which he had no knowledge), and yet he is not innocent (he has collaborated with power unquestioningly and served societal order all his life). He represents another Vonnegut Everyman caught amongst forces he neither understands nor can defend.

Who'd want to assassinate Charlie March? The original Cold War hero. Mentor, brother, confessor-in-chief to Nathan Muir, he's the spy who waltzed in from the cold and wrote a bestseller in the Florida sunshine. But when a bomb on his yacht puts Charlie March on ice, and his dying words implicate Muir, the CIA dispatch hard-luck Agency lawyer Russell Aiken to force Muir's confession and bury forty years of dirty secrets. By legal means...or otherwise.

Obituary writer Bud Stanley isn’t really living his best life. He’s fallen into a funk after a divorce. (She left him for another man, who, in fairness, was far more interesting.) He’s not doing his job well. He’s given up on dating. And he’s about to be fired for accidentally publishing his own obituary one mildly drunken night (though technically the company can’t legally fire a dead person). As Bud awaits his fate at work, he does the only logical thing: He goes to the wakes and funerals of total strangers to learn how to live again.

AN OBSERVER BEST DEBUT NOVEL 2025 SHORTLISTED FOR NOVEL OF THE YEAR AT THE AN POST IRISH BOOK AWARDS LONGLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 'What a joy it is to read' Michael Magee, author of Close to Home 'I couldn't put this book down' Sheena Patel, author of I'm A Fan 'Powerful, moving...

Wally K. Daly's sparkling trilogy of comic crime capers featuring the prison inmates of B Block When Bullet Head, Fingers and the other B Block cons meet Prisoners' Aid society members Charles Forbes and George Evans, trouble ensues. Soon, they are embroiled in daring escapades involving an...

Brought to you by Penguin. In the land of Lapvona, the lord of the land Villiam is cheating the local villagers of their food, their water, their livelihoods. Grotesque and ridiculous, he marries the pregnant and tongueless ex-nun Agata, whom he believes will make him God, and his son will be...

Flann O'Brien's most popular and surrealistic novel concerns an imaginary, hellish village police force and a local murder. Weird, satirical, and very funny, it is read by Irish master reader Jim Norton.

In his startling and singular new short story collection, David Foster Wallace nudges at the boundaries of fiction with inimitable wit and seductive intelligence. Among the stories are 'The Depressed Person', a dazzling and blackly humorous portrayal of a woman's mental state; 'Adult World'...

Maeve has everything. A high-powered job, a beautiful home and a string of uncomplicated one-night encounters. She’s also an addict - a functioning alcoholic with a dependence on sex and an insatiable appetite for killing men. When she can’t find a support group to share her obsession, she creates her own. And Psychopaths Anonymous is born. Friends of Maeve. Now in a serious relationship, Maeve wants to keep the group a secret. But not everyone in the group adheres to the rules.

A collection of interlinked tales of crime and retribution laced with dark humour, set around the festive season – from the No. 1 bestseller Stuart MacBride On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me… Twelve days, twelve stories. Meet Fat Billy Partridge, possibly the worst...

As it turns out, an awful lot. Bunny and co are supposed to be keeping a low profile, but nature calls and ironically, one of their party has a hard and fast rule about not answering that call while surrounded by nature. This is how they end up in the wrong bar, surrounded by the wrong people at the wrongest of wrong times. The local right-wing militia has a big week planned, and Bunny and the boys have inadvertently crashed the party. Before they know it, they’re in a desperate fight for survival against a bunch of people who refuse to believe they’re not who they think they are.

Kyiv, 1919. The Soviets control the city, but White armies menace them from the West. No man trusts his neighbour and any spark of resistance may ignite into open rebellion. When Samson Kolechko's father is murdered, his last act is to save his son from a falling Cossack sabre. Deprived of his right ear instead of his head, Samson is left an orphan, with only his father's collection of abacuses for company. Until, that is, his flat is requisitioned by two Red Army soldiers, whose secret plans Samson is somehow able to overhear with uncanny clarity.

This is a collection of the third six short stories in the Caverns and Creatures series.

Morris Duckworth teaches English to the pampered rich of Verona, and Morris is not pleased. Living a meager existence in a squalid apartment, he regards his privileged students with envy and disdain, first wreaking revenge by petty theft and then, like all good criminals, graduating to grander larceny. When one of those students, a beautiful but vapid heiress named Massimina, falls in love with him, Morris can almost smell upward mobility.

A pandemic has devastated the planet, sorting humanity into two types: the uninfected and the infected, the living and the living dead. The worst of the plague is now past, and Manhattan is slowly being resettled. Armed forces have successfully reclaimed the island south of Canal Street – aka...

The last thing Alice expects to see at her husband’s graveside on his birthday is a giant, talking frog. On closer inspection, it’s a grown man dressed as Kermit. Turns out Alice’s husband is buried next to Ben’s older brother Harry, who—as a parting practical joke in his will—insisted that Ben visit his grave each year, on this specific day, dressed in an as-yet-undisclosed pageant of embarrassing fancy dress.