Historical Humor

Alone in the midnight hours with nothing but dead leaves, stray cats, and legends of ghosts and ghoulies to accompany him. A sleeping village doesn’t mean a simple shift, though. Between the early risers of the farming community, a badger with a sweet tooth, and getting to know his new workmates, there’s no time for Nick to kick his feet up in the station. And of course there’s Claude Jeremiah Greengrass! Why did he have to retreat hastily down a ladder from a lady’s bedroom and what happened to his trousers and shirt?

Gravedigger John Gascoigne lives in Downfell Hurst with his wife, Florrie, their three children and his mother, Gran. John is a deep thinker but extremely taciturn - a man of few words and many grunts. Which is why everyone is alarmed when he's hit on the head by a cricket ball, and it suddenly seems as if the words won't stop. What's more, he says he is talking to Saint Christopher - only no one else can see the saint, and they're beginning to worry John's not quite right in the head.

Brussels, 1943. Twelve-year-old street orphan Helene survives by living as a boy and selling copies of the country’s most popular newspaper, Le Soir, now turned into Nazi propaganda. Helene’s entire world changes when she befriends a rogue journalist, Marc Aubrion, who draws her into a secret network that publishes dissident underground newspapers. The Nazis track down Aubrion’s team and give them an impossible choice: Turn the resistance newspapers into a Nazi propaganda bomb that will sway public opinion against the Allies, or be killed.

Young Kit Kellan has led a rough-and-tumble life - knocking around the Vega System in his youth as a tiger hunter, a brawler, and a bouncer in a bar. But his real fight is just beginning. Summarily expelled from the prestigious Terra University, he is taken into custody by an agent of the System Bureau of Investigation (SBI). Kit's crime: thinking too much and thinking too well. He’s not in custody for long, however. Snatched from captivity by the People’s Revolutionary Society, Kit sets out an epic adventure that will take him to the farthest reaches of the universe.

Nancy Mitford's first novel, a set of completely incompatible and hilariously eccentric characters collide in a Scottish castle. Inspired by Mitford's youthful infatuation with a Scottish aristocrat, her story follows young Jane Dacre to a shooting party at Dulloch Castle, where she tramps around a damp and chilly moor on a hunting expedition with formidable Lady Prague, xenophobic General Murgatroyd, one-eyed Admiral Wenceslaus and an assortment of other ancient and gouty peers of the realm, while falling in love with Albert, a surrealist painter with a mischievous sense of humour.

Deputy sheriff Constance Kopp is outraged to see young women brought into the Hackensack jail over dubious charges of waywardness, incorrigibility, and moral depravity. The strong-willed, patriotic Edna Heustis, who left home to work in a munitions factory, certainly doesn't belong behind bars. And 16-year-old runaway Minnie Davis, with few prospects and fewer friends, shouldn't be publicly shamed and packed off to a state-run reformatory. But such were the laws - and morals - of 1916.

It's 1985, and as Jack returns for another year as head teacher at Ragley village school, some changes are in store. It's the year of Halley's Comet, Band Aid, Trivial Pursuit, Dynasty shoulder pads, Roland Rat and Microsoft Windows. And at Ragley-on-the-Forest, Heathcliffe Earnshaw decides to enter the village scarecrow competition, Ruby the caretaker finds romance and retirement looms for Vera the secretary.

In 1977, Ickey Jerusalem, San Francisco’s golden-boy poet laureate (based on Blake), is found dead in a locked, first-class toilet on an arriving red-eye flight. Ded Smith, a desperately unhappy, intelligent philistine with a highly developed philosophy to match, is called in to investigate the poet’s death. Thus begins a series of hilarious encounters with the members of Jerusalem’s coterie (updated amalgams of characters from Blake’s work).

"Es una verdad mundialmente reconocida que un hombre soltero, poseedor de una gran fortuna, necesita una esposa". Con esta frase comienza la famosa novela de Jane Austen, Orgullo y Prejuicio, que cuenta la vida de la familia Bennet y sus cinco hijas, Jane, Elizabeth, Mary, Catherine Y Lydia. La señora Bennet ve el matrimonio como la única esperanza para sus hijas. Con la llegada al vecindario de Mr. Bingley, un joven rico y soltero, y su apuesto amigo, Mr. Darcy, la vida de las muchachas se ve revolucionada.

Set in 1960's London, Funny Girl is a lively account of the adventures of the intrepid young Sophie Straw as she navigates her transformation from provincial ingnue to television starlet amid a constellation of delightful characters. Insightful and humorous, Nick Hornby's latest does what he does best: endears us to a cast of characters who are funny if flawed, and forces us to examine ourselves in the process.

In 1902, a radical vegetarian and nudist from Nuremberg named August Engelhardt set sail for what was then called the Bismarck Archipelago. His destination: the island Kabakon. His goal: to found a colony based on worship of the sun and coconuts. His malnourished body was found on the beach on Kabakon in 1919; he was 43 years old. Christian Kracht's Imperium uses the outlandish details of Engelhardt's life to craft a fable about the allure of extremism and its fundamental foolishness.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that every man in possession of a wife must be in want of a son. Seventeen eighty-five was to be the most marvelous year of Marianne's life until an unfortunate turn of events left her in a compromised state and desperate for a husband to care - or rather cover - for her. Now she is stuck in an undesirable marriage to Mr. Edward Bennet, a man desperate in his own way for a male heir.

It's 1883 - only a few months after Molly Pepper; her mother, Cassandra; and her friend, Emmett, saved New York from an attack by the megalomaniacal Ambrose Rector while managing to preserve the reputations of Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison, whose technology was manipulated in Rector’s scheme. Their selfless heroism will finally earn them a place in the Inventors’ Guild, alongside the greatest minds of their generation. Unless, of course, no one knows that they did any of that.

Set in the time of Charlemagne and narrated by a nun with her own secrets to keep, The Nonexistent Knight tells the story of Agilulf, a gleaming white suit of armor with nothing inside it. A challenge to his honor sends Agilulf on a search through France, England, and North Africa to confirm the chastity of a virgin he saved from rape years earlier.

Finally available as an audiobook, Joyce Carol Oates' lost classic: a satirical, often surreal, and beautifully plotted Gothic romance that follows the exploits of the audacious Zinn sisters, whose 19th-century pursuit of adventurous lives turns a lens on contemporary American culture.

Mark Robarts, a young vicar, is newly arrived in the village of Framley. With ambitions to further his career, he seeks connections in the county's high society. He is soon preyed upon by a local member of parliament to guarantee a substantial loan, which Mark, in a moment of weakness, agrees to, even though he knows the man is a notorious debtor; it brings Mark to the brink of ruin.

Off the coast of Maine, Ruth Thomas is born into a feud fought for generations by two groups of local lobstermen over fishing rights for the waters that lie between their respective islands. At 18, she has returned from boarding school - smart as a whip, feisty, and irredeemably unromantic - determined to throw over her education and join the "stern men" working the lobster boats.

A delightful day in 1910 at the Haxford Spring Fair turns horrifying and deadly when a balloonist plummets to the earth from the blue skies above. However unlikely, it’s soon discovered that this unfortunate corpse was not done in by his precipitous plunge but instead from an arrow fatally lodged in his chest. Unraveling the twisted web of intrigue that took the man’s life requires the expert skills of Haxford’s brilliant and sartorially splendid Chief Inspector Pignon Scorbion. But the quirky detective is not alone. Aiding Scorbion in his dogged pursuit are his chosen deputies.

It's all here: the story of how Robin lost his birthright as the King's Ranger at Locksley, his archery feats at Nottingham, the outlaws' war with the Sheriff, Robin's pursuit of Marian, and many tales of bravery, rescue, laughter and rivalry with Little John, Friar Tuck, Allan-a-Dale, Much the Miller, Will Scarlett, and all the others.Now you can have this incomparable story read to you, in a gripping full stereo audio book. The story is adapted from the Paul Creswick text. It is faithful to the entire original story.

The most fearsome enemy he ever faced. Of all the enemies that our hero has shrunk away from, there was one he feared above them all. By his own admission they gave him nightmares into his dotage. It was not the French, the Spanish, the Americans, or the Mexicans. It was not even the more exotic adversaries such as the Iroquois, Mahratta, or Zulus. While they could all make his guts churn anxiously, the foe that really put him off his lunch were the Ashanti.