A. Igoni Barrett was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, in 1979 and lives in Lagos. He is a winner of the 2005 BBC World Service short story competition, the recipient of a Chinua Achebe Center Fellowship, a Norman Mailer Center Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency. His short story collection, Love is Power, or Something Like That, was published in 2013. In 2014 he was named on the Africa39 list of sub-Saharan African writers under 40. Blackass is his first novel.

A. Igoni Barrett

The short life of A.J.A. Symons (1900-41) was described by his biographer as an intricate and largely harmless confidence trick. His many interests included the collection of musical boxes and rare books as well as the study and practice of forgery; they left him time to edit an anthology of Edwardian verse and compose studies of H.M. Stanley and other notable figures. He is remembered for The Quest for Corvo, one of the most remarkable biographies ever written, and for co-founding the Wine and Food Society.

A. J. A. Symons

A. J. Liebling, born in Manhattan in 1904, joined the staff of the New Yorker in 1935 and contributed innumerable articles to the magazine throughout his lifetime, on subjects ranging from food to boxing and France to horse racing. As a war correspondent during the Second World War, he reported from France, England and Algeria, and participated in the Normandy landings. In later life he married the writer Jean Stafford, his third wife. He died in 1963.

A. J. Liebling

A. J. Rosen is an author of YA fantasy novels and is an ambassador for Wattpad, known as @agatharoza. Entwined is her first novel.

A. J. Rosen

A. K. Davidson

A. O. Scott has been a film critic at the New York Times since 2000. His writing has appeared in many other publications, including the New York Review of Books, Slate, the New Yorker and the Nation. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 2010, Scott is currently Distinguished Professor of Film Criticism at Wesleyan University. He lives with his family in Brooklyn, New York. 
 
@aoscott

A. O. Scott

A.S. Byatt (1936-2023) was a novelist, short-story writer and critic of international renown. Her novels include Possession (winner of the Booker Prize 1990), the Frederica Quartet and The Children’s Book, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999, and was awarded the Erasmus Prize 2016 for her ‘inspiring contribution to life writing’ and the Pak Kyongni Prize 2017. In 2018 she received the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award.

A. S. Byatt

A. T. Williams won the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2013 for his book A Very British Killing: The Death of Baha Mousa. He lives in Warwickshire.

A. T. Williams

A. W. Chase

Dubbed ‘The new queen of spy fiction’ by the Guardian newspaper, and ‘the real thing’ by the Washington Post, A.C. 'Ava' Glass is the CWA Dagger-shortlisted author of Alias Emma (The Chase), The Traitor and The Trap. The Traitor was a 2023 Richard and Judy Bookclub pick. Alias Emma was a Barnes and Noble book of the month. A former crime reporter and communications consultant, for five years Ava worked closely with spies. Her time in that world fascinated her, and the people she met back then inspire every book she writes.

A.C. Glass

A.E. Housman

Arthur Edward Waite was the designer and co-creator of the now famous Rider Waite Tarot deck. 
 
An American-born British poet and scholarly mystic, his strong interest in all esoteric matters - divination, magic, Kabbalism, alchemy and Freemasony - led to him penning a number of books. These include the Key to the Tarot, The Book of Ceremonial Magic and A New Encyclopedia of Freemasony.

A.E. Waite

A.E. Warren is the author of the Tomorrow's Ancestors series, which consists of Subject Twenty-One, The Hidden Base, The Fourth Species and The Final Rising. 
 
After spending eight years working as a lawyer, she began to write in the evenings and early mornings as a form of escapism from life in a very small cubicle with lots of files. She self-published her first novels in her spare time, which were picked up by Del Rey UK which is the science fiction/fantasy imprint of Penguin Random House. 
 
 She is an avid reader, occasional gamer and fair-weather runner. She lives in the UK with her husband, daughter and hopefully, one day, a wise border terrier named Austen.

A.E. Warren

A.G.D. Maran

A.J. Ayer

A.J. Cronin

A K Benedict writes crime and speculative fiction in a room filled with clowns, mannequins and Doctor Who figures. Her first novel, The Beauty of Murder, was nominated for an eDunnit award and is in development for a major 8-part TV series by Company Pictures. Her second, Jonathan Dark or The Evidence of Ghosts, came out in February 2016. She's written Torchwood audio dramas for Big Finish and her short stories have featured in anthologies including Great British Horror and Best British Short Stories. She lives in St Leonards-on-Sea with her dog, Dame Margaret Rutherford.

A.K.Benedict

A. L. Kennedy has twice been selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and has won a host of other awards – including the Costa Book of the Year for her novel Day. She lives in Essex.

A.L. Kennedy

A.M. Ellis is a speculative fiction author and lover of everything steeped in myth and mystery. Her stories often lean into diverse voices, not only in her identity as a Black woman, but in exploring neurodivergence and mental health. A proud introvert and nostalgic gamer, she lives in Maryland, USA, with her husband and three children.

A.M. Ellis

A.N. Wilson was born in 1950 and educated at Rugby and New College, Oxford. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he holds a prominent position in the world of literature and journalism. He is an award-winning biographer and a celebrated novelist, winning prizes for much of his work. He lives in North London.

A.N. Wilson

A. T. Emerald lives with her husband and baby daughter in Nottinghamshire. She discovered her love of writing in 2020 and has not shut up about enemies to lovers ever since. She loves iced matcha, torrid love confessions with knives pressed to throats (fictional, of course) and does not accept bills for any therapy her books might incur.

A.T. Emerald

A.W. Priest

A.B.C. Merriman-Labor was a barrister, writer and munitions worker born in Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1877. His published works include A Series of Lectures on the Negro Race and The Story of the African Slave in a Nutshell. He also edited two editions of the Handbook of Sierra Leone. He arrived in the UK in 1904 to study law. In 1907, he organised a centenary commemoration of the abolition of the slave trade in Westminster Abbey. He later embarked on an 'entertainment-lecture' tour called Life and Scenes in Britain, travelling across thousands of miles of West, South West and Central Africa, which he expanded on to create Britons Through Negro Spectacles.

ABC Merriman-Labor

AJ Cronin

AJ Molloy

Aabria Iyengar is an American actress and author.

Aabria Iyengar

Aaliya Jaleel is a freelance illustrator, designer, and visual development artist, currently majoring in Animation at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is also the illustrator of Under My Hijab and Muslim Girls Rise. You can visit her online at www.aaliyamj.com.

Aaliya Jaleel

Aaron Allston

After more than fifteen years of experience as a clinical psychotherapist, Dr Aaron Balick has taken the amazing insights from psychology and psychotherapy out of the consultation room and made them accessible to the wider world. 
 
He has been an ‘agony uncle’ for many years for both CBBC and BBC Radio 1, as well as on television, including BBC Worldwide, BBC 3 and BBC Learning.

Aaron Balick

Aaron Carroll

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Sebastian Faulks

pistache (pis-tash): a friendly spoof or parody of another's work. [Deriv uncertain. Possibly a cross between pastiche and p**stake.] 
 
From Thomas Hardy's football report to Dan Brown's visit to the cash dispenser, the work of the great and the not-so-great is here sent up with little hope of coming down. 
 
Most of these pieces began their life on Radio Four's The Write Stuff, but have been retooled for the printed page. Others, such as Martin Amis's first day at Hogwarts, have been written specially for this collection. 
 
Philip Larkin's Lines in Celebration of the Queen Mother's 115th Birthday, first banned, then cut by the BBC, appears in its entirety for the first time. 
 
This is not a book for the faint-hearted or the downstairs lavatory. It is a book for the bedside table of someone you cannot live without.

Pistache

Rick Wakeman

What do Postman Pat, Tommy Cooper, Norman Wisdom and George Best have in common with being abandoned in a Costa Rican jungle after a severe bout of flatulence? Indeed, how are they also connected to trying to buy an Australian brewery just to get a beer, owning twenty-two cars, an American soccer team and a Swiss mail-order pornography company? 
 
The common feature is of course a certain Richard Wakeman. 
 
The Further Adventures of a Grumpy Old Rock Star takes you, the privileged reader, on a trip of absurd excess, a cultural car crash of side-splitting hilarity and an unforgettable glimpse (again) into the life of one of Britain's most legendary showmen, rock stars and all-time great raconteurs.

Further Adventures of a Grumpy Old Rock Star

Arthur Smith

'My name is Arthur Smith, unless there's anybody here from the Streatham tax office. In which case, I'm Daphne Fairfax.' This has been Arthur's opening line at hundreds of stand-up comedy performances. In fact, he is neither Daphne nor Arthur. Friends and family know him as Brian. 
 
One of the 'alternative comedians' who shook up light entertainment in the eighties and nineties, Arthur (and Brian) is also a broadcaster, an opening bat for Grumpy Old Men, a West End playwright (his plays include An Evening with Gary Lineker) and a guest on innumerable radio and TV panel shows. 
 
In My Name is Daphne Fairfax he reflects on the nature of comedy and his days as a scruffy kid on the bombsites of Bermondsey, a wild-haired undergraduate, a roadsweeper, an English teacher, a failed rock star, a boozed-up sexual adventurer and an intensive care patient who has been told never to drink again. 
 
Hilarious, scandalous and rude, his memoir incorporates a tender tribute to his parents and a vigorous account of the peculiar business of being alive.

My Name is Daphne Fairfax

A Memoir

David Quantick

So your husband/boyfriend/partner (delete as necessary) has just tipped over 35/40/45/50 (delete as necessary) and you can see that he's not quite as keen on Emmerdale as he once was. He's started to dress with his jeans hoiked too high like his hero Jeremy Clarkson and he's bought a home gym - the one recommended by George Clooney. Then there are those Harley Davison brochures delivered in brown envelopes. You've noticed he's started pulling in his beer gut when he's talks to his teenage secretary. And why have his grey sideburns turned that browny black? That's a sure sign of hair dye. And then you stumble into the bathroom in the morning and he's got his hands in a jar of your face cream. 
 
LADIES BEWARE! 
 
That dangerous age has arrived. It's the male menopause. The mid-life crisis. The time when suddenly you find your partner has put a whole Scalextrix track in your attic without you noticing. He's bought an electric guitar and insists on playing 'Smoke On The Water 'to the cat at all hours. It that time when no matter what you say they suddenly don't mind making a fools of themselves. They come home almost every week with a new enthusiasm. Dangerous Men don't just cook - they COOK. With truffles, that cost £210 for one the size of a wrinkled scrotum, and have to be from the right region of France. And they must be served with a side order of blowfish, because you saw that in a James Bond DVD that came free with the Mail on Sunday.

The Dangerous Book for Middle-Aged Men

A Manual for Managing Mid-Life Crisis

Barbara Cartland

'For the record, the word "parlour" is not used, nor is the relatively recent insidious "lounge", except about airports, hotels and liners.' 
 
'Boys should be taught at a very early age - six or seven - to say "Sir" to an older man.' 
 
'When there are servants, the plates for the first course are never put on the table until everyone is seated.' 
 
'I cannot stress too often that on every formal occasion, whether it is Luncheon, a Bazaar or a Meeting, a hat should be worn.' 
 
Written nearly 50 years ago, Barbara Cartland's Etiquette Handbook conjures up a period when addressing work colleagues by their first names was frowned upon, wives could expect to receive a weekly allowance of five shillings from their husbands, and hats were ubiquitous. Laced throughout with Barbara Cartland's wit and wisdom, and Francis Marshall's illustrations, this is a wonderfully evocative insight into the manners of an England that has largely disappeared.

Barbara Cartland's Etiquette Handbook

A Guide to Good Behaviour from the Boudoir to the Boardroom

Frank Skinner

In this new volume of memoirs, Frank Skinner describes his experience of going back on the road doing stand-up again, after many years spent working mainly on television. His adventures on tour are by turns funny and moving as he meditates on growing older, the terrors and joys of trying to make a live audience laugh night after night and on the nature of comedy itself. 
 
For the first time we read a comedian's account, in his own words, of how his act is put together; his return to a world of dark little clubs and the strange encounters he has there. But what is perhaps most startling and original about Frank Skinner's writing is his honesty nbout not only the highs and lows of his career, but more intimate and personal issues - male sexuality and matters of the heart.

Frank Skinner on the Road

Love, Stand-up Comedy and The Queen Of The Night

Dawn French

A SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER 
___________________________ 
The hilarious and heartwarming memoir from one of Britain's best-loved comedians and Women's Prize longlisted author, Dawn French. 
 
Dawn French is one of the greatest comedians of our time with a career that has spanned nearly four decades. Loved for her irreverent humour, Dawn has achieved massive mainstream success while continuing to push boundaries and challenge stereotypes. Here, she describes the journey that would eventually establish her as a perhaps unlikely, but nevertheless genuine, national treasure. 
 
As part of the much loved duo French and Saunders, Dawn helped create a repertoire of brilliantly observed characters, impersonating everything from Madonna and Harry Potter to The Exorcist. Dawn's iconic role in the Vicar of Dibley showcased not only her talent but also her ability to take a controversial and topical issue and make it mainstream - and very funny. 
 
From her early years as an RAF child and her flat-sharing antics with Jennifer Saunders, to her outspoken views on sizism and her marriage to Lenny Henry, Dear Fatty chronicles the extraordinary and hilarious rise of a complex, dynamic and unstoppable woman.

Dear Fatty

Lisa Gee

When Lisa Gee's six-year-old daughter, Dora, goes to an open audition for the West End production of The Sound of Music, it's just a fun way to occupy some time in the Easter holidays. But when Dora unexpectedly lands the role, Lisa soon learns that Dora's brush with fame has less to do with paparazzi and lucrative paydays and more to do with endless rehearsals and outsize egos. 
 
Part fairy tale, part cautionary tale, this is the hilarious, engaging account of one child's step into the limelight. From the initial try-out with over a thousand Von Trapp hopefuls to performing on the London stage with Connie Fisher and an encounter with Julie Andrews, mother and daughter navigate the minefield of rehearsals, auditions and fame. This is a heart-warming glimpse into the sometimes not-so-glamorous world of show business and the delicate balance between being proud and being pushy. Stage Mum is a story for every parent who dreams big and every child who dreams bigger.

Stage Mum

A J Jacobs

Avoiding shellfish was easy. The stoning of adulterers proved a little more difficult - and potentially controversial. Was it enough to walk up to an adulterer and gently touch them with a stone? Even that could be grounds for accusations of assault, especially with female adulterers in Manhattan. So what's a good Bible-reading boy to do? 
 
Raised in a secular family but increasingly interested in the relevance of faith in our modern world, A.J. Jacobs decides to dive in head first and attempt to obey the hundreds of less-publicized rules. The resulting spiritual journey is at once funny and profound, reverent and irreverent, personal and universal, and will make you see history's most influential book with new eyes.

The Year of Living Biblically

Chelsea Handler

Chelsea Handler is a woman on a mission. She's smart, sassy and not afraid to speak her mind. From an early age Chelsea knew exactly what she wanted and even in the trickiest of situations, she's never one to pass up an opportunity. Like the time she convinced her third-grade class she was shooting movies with Goldie Hawn on location in the Galapagos just to get them to 
like her, or when she spent the night in a women's prison, contemplating an affair with the inmate who killed her own sister. Chelsea it seems, has done it all, and a whole lot more ... 
 
Any mishaps along the way just spur Chelsea on further. Whether she is being dry-humped by a sumo masseur, dumped by her Big Red experiment or kicked out of a London restaurant with her pants down, Chelsea is always armed with an unshakeable disregard for rules and is incapable of leading a quiet life. 
 
Are You There Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea is an entertaining memoir-in-stories that will have you rolling around with laughter.

Are you there Vodka? It's me, Chelsea

Charlie Croker

Have you ever arrived in a hotel room and been baffled by the information provided? 
Beware of your luggage. 
In your room you will find a minibar which is filled with alcoholics. 
Do not throw urine around. 
 
Have you ever been to a restaurant and wondered what on earth to order? 
Bored Meat Stew 
Lorry Driver Soup 
Kiss Lorraine 
 
Have you ever arrived in an airport and found that the supposedly helpful signs just make you feel more lost? 
You are required to declare all sorts of private things. 
Departure. Bus stop. Car rectal. 
Please buy your ticket consciously. 
 
Charlie Croker has, and in 2006 he gathered together what he thought was the definitive collection of English language howlers for his bestselling book Lost in Translation. But he reckoned without the great British public. Not only was the book a smash hit, it also opened the floodgates to a deluge of emails and letters stuffed full of further mistranslations and mutilated phrases. From a leaflet from the Museum of Rasputin in Russia (which is apparently situated in a house that belonged a pilot fish Zubov) to a song title on a pirated Pink Floyd CD (Come Fartably Numb), the scrambled sentences just kept flooding in. At the same time Charlie has continued his travels and picked up gems of his own. With such a wealth of material, a sequel wasn't just a necessity, it was a public service, and Still Lost in Translation is even more addictive, whimsical and side-splittingly hilarious than the first book.

Still Lost in Translation

More misadventures in English abroad

Favell Lee Mortimer

Todd Pruzan

In the middle of the 1800s, Mrs Favell Lee Mortimer set out to write an ambitious guide to all the nations on Earth. There were just three problems: 
 
She had never set foot outside Shropshire. 
She was horribly misinformed about virtually every topic she turned her attention to. 
And she was prejudiced against foreigners. 
 
The result was an unintentionally hilarious masterpiece: 
'The French like being smart but are not very clean.' 
'The Japanese are very polite people - much politer than the Chinese - but very proud.' 
'The Scotch will not take much trouble to please strangers.' 
 
In The Clumsiest People in Europe, Todd Pruzan has gathered together a selection of Mrs Mortimer's finest moments, celebrating the woman who turned ignorance into an art form.

The Clumsiest People in Europe

A Bad-Tempered Guide To The World

Richard Littlejohn

Richard Littlejohn's cast of characters &shy; including Two Jags, the Wicked Witch, Captain Hook and the Mad Mullah of the Traffic Taliban &shy; are now part of the fabric of the nation. He ridicules the country Britain has become over the past ten years - the barmy bureaucracy, the surveillance state, the petty interference in our lives, the suffocating regulations, policemen and judges who think they're part of the social services and the insanities of the 'elf 'n' safety industry, which has created such idiocies as forcing revellers celebrating Guy Fawkes Night to watch a bonfire on a big screen. 
 
'Littlejohn has been ... a vivid exponent of a great British columnar style that stretches back five centuries or more. He's a distant, bastard cousin of Thomas Nash, Daniel Defoe and Alexander Pope. Cassandra and Bernard Levin might justly buy him a pint in the Cheshire Cheese. Like or loathe him, he's the real, talented deal.' Observer

Littlejohn's Britain

Alan Alda

He's one of America's most recognisable and acclaimed actors-a star on Broadway, an Oscar nominee for The Aviator, and the only person to ever win Emmys for acting, writing, and directing during his eleven years on M*A*S*H. Now Alan Alda has written a memoir as elegant, funny, and affecting as his greatest performances. 'My mother didn't try to stab my father until I was six,' begins Alan Alda's irresistible story. The son of a popular actor and a loving, but mentally ill mother, he spent his early childhood backstage in the erotic and comic world of burlesque and went on after early struggles to achieve extraordinary success in his profession. 
 
Yet Never Have Your Dog Stuffed is not a memoir of show business ups and downs. It is a moving and funny story of a boy growing into a man who then realizes he has only begun to grow. It is the story of turning points in his life, events that would make him what he is - if only he could survive them. 
 
From the moment as a boy when his dead dog is returned from the taxidermist's shop with a hideous expression on his face, and he learns that death can't be undone, to the decades-long effort to find compassion for the mother he lived with but never knew, to his acceptance of his father in him, personally and professionally, he learns the hard way that change, uncertainty and transformation are what life is made of, and the good life is made of welcoming them. 
 
Never Have Your Dog Stuffed, filled with curiosity about Nature, good humour and honesty, is the crowning achievement of an actor, author, and director, but surprisingly, it is the story of a life more filled with turbulence and laughter than any he's ever played on the stage or screen.

Never Have Your Dog Stuffed

'Many people feel like a one-night stand is something to be ashamed or embarrassed of. I disagree...' 
 
We've all (well not quite all, perhaps) had at least one: a one-night stand. Often embarrassing and uncomfortable, occasionally outlandish, but most times just a necessary and irresistible evil, the one-night-stand is a social rite as old as sex itself and as common as a bar stool. 
 
Enter Chelsea Handler. Gorgeous, sharp, and anything but shy, Chelsea loves men... Lots of them. My Horizontal Life chronicles Chelsea's romps through the bedrooms of a host of potential suitors, uncovering what can happen in one night of passion between a man and a sometimes very intoxicated woman. 
 
From her short fling with a Vegas stripper named Thunder to her even shorter fling with a very short man, she recalls her myriad one-night stands with hilarious honesty. My Horizontal Life is a sensationally frank and funny memoir of sexual life, and a gloriously quirky take on why we do the things we do. Whether you have been there yourself or not, its one guilty pleasure you won't be ashamed to talk about in the morning...

My Horizontal Life

Steven Jacobi

What makes people laugh? Where does the urge to make people laugh come from? And just how hard can it really be to become a stand-up comedian? In pursuit of the answers to these questions - and more - writer and comedy obsessive, Steven Jacobi has set himself a horrifying task: to perform as a stand-up comic in six comedy clubs around Britain. (The Amused Moose, at the Enterprise in Chalk Farm; XSMalarkey in Manchester; the Cheeky Monkey at the Station in Kings Heath, Birmingham; Ha! in New York; Oi! Oi! in Eastbourne and Up the Creek in Greenwich, London.) 
As he gathers together material for his big adventure, Jacobi tracks down his comedy heroes, Ken Dodd and Woody Allen and seeks their advice and wisdom. He looks at the long tradition of British humour and looks to, among others, a Python, Eric Sykes, Frank Skinner and Steve Coogan to get their take on comedy. 
Only then does he embark on his ordeal, logging - in unsparing detail - the venues, audiences, hecklers and humiliation. All the while charting his all-important material, evolving - and hopefully refining - as he travels across the country on his masochistic odyssey.

Laughing Matters

Gerard Jones

In the depths of the Depression, out of the crowded tenements of New York and Cleveland, the comic book superhero leapt into being. Out of a mix of geekiness, science fiction, and outsider yearning, a crew of young men from working-class Jewish neighbourhoods and shady backgrounds created a series of blue-eyed, chisel-nosed crime fighters and adventurers who quickly captured the imaginations of young and old. Within a few years their creations had spawned a new genre that still dominates youth entertainment seventy years later. 
 
Gerard Jones draws on exhaustive research to portray how the immigrant experience and an outsider mentality shaped the vision of the make-believe hero, while a bizarre melting-pot of left-wing politics, mob money and the worlds of soft-porn and detective magazines contributed to the publishing world that produced the comics and brought them to millions. He chronicles how the success of the comics provoked a backlash that nearly destroyed the industry in the 1950s, and how later they surged back, inspiring a new generation to transmute pre-war fantasies into art, literature, blockbuster movies and graphic novels. 
 
Men of Tomorrow rivetingly demonstrates how the creators of the superheroes established their crucial place in the modern imagination.

Men Of Tomorrow

Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book

Mark Wallington

Mark Wallington has a dream. He is going to change the face of British comedy. 
 
Unfortunately for the residents of north London, he's going to finance this dream by becoming a gardener. 
 
The result is The Day Job, an account of a year spent working in other people's gardens: people like Mrs Fleming who is convinced there is buried treasure in the bottom bed; Mr Walters who is trying to create a fascist state policed by gnomes in his well-guarded plot in Gospel Oak; Mrs Glover who is probably the most attractive woman living in Britain; and poor Mr Nugent, who likes to save his urine in jam jars and pour it over his compost. 
 
Over four seasons Wallington crosses Hampstead Heath from job to job. He survives brushes with the evil contract gardeners who keep trying to knock him off his bicycle. He strives to impress literary agent Herman Gapp who might represent him - depending on what sort of job he does on Gapp's Alpine Terrace. He even finds time to fall for a housecleaner-cum-actor named Helen, as he becomes part of a strange band of artistes, each with a day job of their own, all waiting for that first break. 
 
This is the story of long nights spent in the back room of a pub trying to write unsolicited scripts, and of much longer days spent trying to understand the British and their strange obsession with gardening.

The Day Job

Adventures of a Jobbing Gardener

Travels with Boogie is the story of two city slickers - one an unattractive but streetwise mongrel from Stockwell, the other the long-suffering author - and how they came to terms with England's countryside and waterways. 
 
First they had to survive against all odds as they embarked on a heroic journey up hill and down dale, with rucksacks full of Kennomeat, along Britain's longest coastal footpath - from Somerset to Devon, from Cornwall to Dorset. And they did it. Then, undaunted, they took on the treacherous waters of the Thames. Not exactly as Mark had planned, however: this time his companion was to be the delectable Jennifer - but she was held up at the office, and when Boogie was dropped off at the kennels the other dogs complained. 
 
Travels with Boogie is a witty and fascinating account of a mismatched couple and of the people they meet and places they visit.

Travels With Boogie

500 Mile Walkies and Boogie Up the River in One Volume

On leaving school or university, you feel pretty pleased with yourself. You've learnt a lot, your'e well-read and you know a whole bunch of obscure facts guaranteed at some point to appear in the questions on Mastermind or University Challenge. Then you get a job, and ten years later youre more eloquent and eager to argue about Britney and Big Brother than Beckett and the Brontes. Sound familiar? 
 
Well it happened to AJ Jacobs too. As an editor at Esquire, Jacobs had built up a rather impressive knowledge of celebrity trivia - and the cure was going to take a long time. While others might take to reading a broadsheet at the weekend, Jacobs chose to read the Encyclopaedia Britannica. All 33,000 pages of it. 
 
Bill Bryson meets Schott's Original Miscellany meets Woody Allen. Part assemblage of fascinating trivia, part journey through adulthood, all laugh-out-loud funny.

The Know-It-All

One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World

Eve Ensler

Eve Ensler is back and has set her sight slightly higher with an intimate contemplation of her second greatest obsession: her tortured relationship with her post-forties stomach. 
 
Ensler toured the world asking women about their bodies and gives us their wild and wonderful and deeply moving stories. She frames these stories with her own personal journey, serving up riotous excerpts from her lifelong dialogue with her stomach - a sassy and conniving antagonist in its own right. We follow her through the serial seduction of low-carb diets, ab rollers and personal trainers, to the wise words of a woman who taught her how to love her body, and see that it was good...

The Good Body

William Cook

Peter Cook and Dudley Moore are the greatest double act that Great Britain has ever produced. This collection of their works is a comprehensive compilation of the finest comedy sketches that Cook and Moore ever wrote together - from the beginning of their partnership, in the groundbreaking stage show, Beyond The Fringe, to the notorious taboo busting Derek and Clive LPs that captured the spirit of punk rock, and inspired the scatological anarchy of Alternative Comedy. Featuring transcripts of one night stands long since almost forgotten, as well as a wealth of virtually unknown material, including previously unpublished scripts for Not Only But Also, Goodbye Again is a revelation, even for Cook and Moore's most informed fans. 
 
As well as illuminating their work, this book also promises to shed light on their intimate yet turbulent relationship. It will show how these two diametrically opposed men; tall and athletic Cook from a middle class public boarding school background, and diminutive, club-footed Moore, working class but with an impressive musical talent, came together to develop the closest of partnerships based on an instinctive, virtually intuitive sense of humour. Goodbye Again will chart the extraordinary friendship between the two men and its almost telepathic intensity, which not only bought them together but also pulled them apart time after time, until their eventual reconciliation.

Goodbye Again

Peter Cook and Dudley Moore

Molly Watson

When two city girls embark on an afternoon of idle window-shopping in Worcestershire and end up buying a horse, their lives swerve gloriously off course. Within weeks they have abandoned their careers in London in favour of life in the wilds of Ledbury. But their dreams of a sunny rural idyll, preferably funded by a landed local bachelor, are quick to shatter. Thrown into a hair-raising world where the horses have cocaine habits and the locals have developed their own alternative to Viagra, Molly Watson and her sister Annabel make their way through the maelstrom that is country life to hilarious effect.

In The Pink

A Rural Odyssey

Deborah Coates

Cats have been with us for thousands of year. They are: 
 
Enigmatic friends 
Lone hunters, family pets 
Our garden tigers 
 
and they too can be a man's best friend. The haiku is an ancient and honourable Japanese verse form - three lines, seventeen syllables - encapsulating a vision of the poem's subject; a person, place, even a cat... 
 
CAT HAIKU presents cats as you've never seen them before. In a series of brilliant vignettes, Deborah Coates gets inside the minds of our cats and comes up with some surprising revelations. You will never look at your (or anyone else's) cat the same way again.

Cat Haiku

Lin Cook

An intimate and entertaining portrait of one of comedy's greatest geniuses by those who knew Peter Cook best and can write abut his rare talent. The contributors include Clive Anderson, Alan Bennett, John Cleese, Stephen Fry, William Goldman, Barry Humphries, Eric Idle, Dudley Moore and Michael Palin.

Something Like Fire

Peter Cook

For his many friends and fans, Peter Cook was quite simply the funniest man they'd ever encountered. And nearly eight years since his death, his status as one of Britain's greatest comedians shows no sign of shrinking. Despite his reputation for idleness, Peter Cook was a great comedy writer, who created countless outrageous sketches and articles and was famed for his prolific role in the satire boom of the 1960s. The very best, the most famous and some of the most unusual of his comic masterpieces are collected here. Some of these pieces have never been published before, others are out of print, a few only survive in print, and many have only ever been seen or heard - never read. This collection ranges from Cook's first writing, at school and university, via Beyond The Fringe, with Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller, his dualogues with Moore as Pete &amp; Dud and Derek &amp; Clive, and their brilliant TV series, Not Only But Also, to transcripts of his late, great TV appearances, and a selection of his journalism for the Daily Mail, the Evening Standard and Private Eye.

Tragically I Was an Only Twin

The Comedy of Peter Cook

Ruth Reichl

In this delightful sequel to her bestseller Tender at the Bone, the beloved food writer Ruth Reichl returns with more tales full of love, life, humour and marvellous meals. Ruth Reichl's pursuit of good food and good company leads her to New York and China, France and Los Angeles.  She cooks and dines with world-famous chefs and the three star aristocracy of French cuisine, and her accounts of these meetings range from the madcap to the sublime.  Reichl lovingly recreates all her marvellous meals in such succulent detail that readers will yearn from truffles in Provence and shrimp in Beijing. Throughout it all, Reichl is unafraid, even eager, to poke holes in the pretensions of food critics, making each and every course a hilarious and instructive occasion for novices and experts alike.  She shares some of her first recipes so readers can make the Dry-Fried Shrimp she first tasted in China, or the Dacquoise served at the end of a magical visit to a Paris bistro.  Reichl also shares the intimacies of her personal life in a style so honest and warm that readers will feel they are enjoying a cosy dining-table conversation with a friend. In Comfort Me With Apples, Reichl again demonstrates her inimitable ability to combine food writing, humour and memoir into an art form.

Comfort Me With Apples

Love, Adventure and a Passion for Cooking

The British Association For The Advancement Of Science

In September 2001 the British Association for the Advancement of Science (the BA) embarked on the world's largest, and most unusual, scientific experiment. The aim of the project was to find the world's funniest joke, and answer important questions about the psychology of humour. For example, Do men and women find the same jokes funny? Does our sense of humour change as we get older? What is the best time of day to tell a joke? Do different nations laugh at the same jokes? The experiment was called LaughLab and was carried out as part of Science Year in the UK. An Internet site was established containing two sections: in the first, people submitted their favourite jokes; in the second they answered a few simple questions about themselves - male or female, age, nationality, etc - and then rated how funny they found a random selection of jokes. The experiment captured the imagination of individuals throughout the world. 40,000 jokes were received and evaluated by 350,000 people. At the end of the project the information was carefully examined and discoveries made about the jokes that made men giggle and women groan, those that tickled kids but not adults, and the jokes that were the most popular in different countries. Along the way the 'winning' jokes in different categories were uncovered, including the best 'doctor' jokes

Laughlab

The Scientific Quest for the World's Funniest Joke

Trevor Norton

This is the remarkably funny true story of some of the brave, brilliant and often barmy men that invented diving. It is a story of explosive tempers and exploding teeth, of how to juggle live hand grenades and steer a giant rubber octopus. A series of vivid portraits reveal the eccentric exploits of these underwater pioneers. They include Guy who held a world altitude record when only sixteen, wrote a film for Humphrey Bogart, invented snorkelling and loved his wife enough to shoot her. Roy wore a backet over his head and stole a coral reef. Bill wearied of fishing with dynamite and wrestling deadly snakes, so he sealed himself in a metal coffin to dangle half a mile beneath the ocean. Cameron, testing the bouncing bomb for dam busters, made a plastic ear for a dog, a false testicle for a stallion and invented a mantrap disguised as a lavatory. He ascended from a depth of 200 feet without breathing equipment to see if his lungs would burst, then studied the effects of underwater explosions by standing closer and closer until shattered by the blast. The book also traces the evolution of underwater exploration, from spear fishermen to conversationalists, from treasure hunters to archaeologists, from photographers to philosophers. The sea is a secretive and seductive place and the author describes, with incredible humour, knowledge and historical accuracy, the magic and mystery of being beneath the waves.

Stars Beneath The Sea

Bob Monkhouse

Bob`s journals of the last few years are interwoven with memories of a life in comedy. There are meetings with remarkable comedians -some like Paul Merton at the height of their powers, others like Dick Emery and Benny Hill in sad decline - and Bob reflects on what makes comedians great. Above all here is a wealth of wonderful true adventures, star scandals and gossip about the famous and infamous personalities he`s known initmately, with more stars than the most lavish Royal Variety Performance, including: Peter Sellers, Rex Harrison, Les Dawson, Elton John, Larry Grayson, Bing Crosby, Beryl Reid, k d lang and Luciano Pavarotti. As Bob puts it, `All the good stuff I couldn`t put in my autobiography because there wouldn`t have been room for me!' There has always been room for Bob in the hearts of the British public, and this very, very funny book is just one more reason why he so richly deserves his place in our affections.

Over The Limit

A Private Thriller

A series of children's modern classic novels by renowned 20th century children's writers. All the titles in this series have the A Puffin Book logo, contemporary-style covers, and child-friendly endnotes.

A Puffin Book

A Ripley Novel

A Slice of the Moon

A Victorian Mystery

A Walk in...

A Women’s Murder Club Thriller

A chef Paul Delamare Mystery

Aberrations

Across the Universe

Actiphons

Adelia Aguilar

Adrian Mole

Adventures in Time

Aftermath

Against War

Age of X

Agent 21

Agent Z

Detective Aidan Waits is a troubled junior detective haunted by his past. Facing an uncertain future, and disconnected from his history, DC Waits and his partner, Detective Inspector Peter 'Sutty' Sutcliffe work on Manchester's streets to uncover the city's worst criminals among the grime of the underworld.

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