Life Satire

When Rachel Meyer, a 30-something foodie from New York, agrees to move to Mumbai with her Indian-born husband, Dhruv, she knows some culture shock is inevitable. Blessed with a curious mind and an independent spirit, Rachel is determined to learn her way around the hot, noisy, seemingly infinite metropolis she now calls home. But the expat American’s sense of adventure is sorely tested when her mother-in-law, Swati, suddenly arrives from Kolkata - 1,000 miles away - alone, with an even more shocking announcement: She’s left her husband of more than 40 years and moving in with them.

A mordantly funny, all-too-real novel in the vein of Tom Perotta and Emma Straub about a suburban American family that has to figure out how to survive themselves and their neighbors in the wake of a global calamity that upends all of modern life.

Hard Times is the tenth novel by Charles Dickens, first published in 1854. The book surveys English society and satirizes the social and economic conditions of the era. Hard Times is unusual in several ways. It is by far the shortest of Dickens's novels, barely a quarter of the length of those written immediately before and after it. Moreover, it is his only novel not to have scenes set in London. Instead, the story is set in the fictitious Victorian industrial Coketown, a generic Northern English mill-town.

Zach Post is an editor for It magazine with an impressive history: his father is a famous architect, his mother a socialite, and he has attended Colgate, Berkley, and Liverpool University. Or, at least that's what everyone thinks. When obnoxious new editor Mark Larkin is quickly promoted, Zach's secrets are threatened, and his future no longer seems bright. But he knows what to do-Mark Larkin must be eliminated.

In her 50s, Cassie has already weathered more than most. She was orphaned at the age of two and has never fully understood why her DC-based parents were on a bridge in West Virginia that just so happened to collapse as they drove across it. Her search for answers prompted a failed career in journalism, and now she’s an aspiring novelist teaching at a local community college waiting for her literary dreams to finally come true.

Jack Dee is here to help. Too often today the emphasis in psychotherapy is on providing clients with a metaphorical hug when what they so clearly need is good slap, so Jack Dee took the matter into his own hands, and whilst everyone else was baking bread and clearing out their cupboards during lockdown, he retrained online as a psychotherapist. After an incredibly gruelling four hours of study, he got his certificate of completion from The Ruislip College of Advansed Learning (sic).

Jenny is unloved, unemployable and emotionally unfiltered. Her long-suffering friends seem sick of her, and whilst her social media portrays her life as a bed of roses, it is more of a dying succulent. Adults is what you want it to be. A misadventure of maturity, a satire on our age of self-promotion, a tender look at the impossibility of womanhood, a love story, a riot. And Emma Jane Unsworth is the only voice to hear it from. Adults is excruciating, a gut punch of hilarity and an audiobook laden with truth that you will listen to again and again.

The Right Address sears through the upper crust of New York's glittering Park Avenue scene to dish the dirt on the ladies who lunch, the gents who club, and the desperate climbers who will stop at nothing to join the backstabbing, champagne-sipping, socialite-eat-socialite stratosphere.

To all appearances, Zachary King is a man with luck on his side. A steady, well-paying job, a rent-free Manhattan apartment, and Hope, his stunning, blue-blooded fiancee: smart, sexy, and completely out of his league. But as the wedding day looms, Zack finds himself haunted by the memory of his best friend, Rael, killed in a car wreck two years earlier, and by his increasingly complicated feelings for Tamara, the beautiful widow Rael left behind.

Bienvenue à Greenwich, Connecticut, où les gazons et les femmes sont parfaitement entretenus, les mecs et les sodas forts, et où tout le monde a quelque chose à dire sur le nouveau voisin d'à côté. Ex-associée dans un des plus grands cabinets d'avocats de Manhattan, Miriam a depuis peu troqué sa robe contre des leggings hors de prix et commence les cocktails dès le matin. De quoi lui donner le temps d'accueillir dans cette banlieue huppée, où les pièges sont nombreux, Emily - ex-assistante de la grande Miranda Priestly - qui vit une mauvaise passe.

Wannabe actress Dani Steele's résumé resembles a cautionary tale on how not to be famous. She's pushing thirty and stuck in a dead-end insurance job, and her relationship status is holding at uncommitted. With unbearably perfect sisters and a mother who won't let her forget it, Dani has two go-tos for consolation: maple scones and a blog in which she pours her heart out to her celebrity idol. He's the man her father never was, no boyfriend will ever be - and not so impossible a dream as one might think.

In the beginning, there was The Average American Male. Maxim called it "pure filth". Even Penthouse called it "appalling". The New York Times called it "the literary love child of Neil LaBute, Judy Blume, and Eminem". Now, Chad Kultgen's unforgettable antihero is back - this time as a married man.

After eight and a half years and 323 pageants, Miranda Miller has become the ultimate stage mother. Her mission in life is to see that her nine-year-old daughter, Bailey, continues to be one of the most successful child pageant contestants in the southern United States. Lately, though, that mission has become increasingly difficult. Bailey wants to retire and has been secretly binge eating to make herself "unpageantable". But Miranda has a plan.

Taylor Bell comes from a long line of Beta Zeta sorority sisters, all of whom expect her to pledge upon starting at the university. However, Taylor is determined to destroy the rich tradition they hold so dear by eschewing sorority life altogether. Taylor's resolve soon melts, though, when she falls in with a group of hilarious, ultra-saucy girls who introduce her to all things Greek and soften her to the idea of joining.

A smart, funny, and essential survival guide that you didn't know you needed. But you do. As any current or former 20-something knows, adult life can get a bit weird because no one tells you what to expect. Many of us spend a decade or more figuring out how the world works, hoping that by age 30 our friends are too old to remember what happened. Unfortunately, Andy Boyle does not have it all figured out. But the funny and useful advice and observations in this engaging audiobook will help any newly minted adult get through the hard parts.

First published in 1873, The Gilded Age is both a biting satire and a revealing portrait of post-Civil War America - an age of corruption when crooked land speculators, ruthless bankers, and dishonest politicians voraciously took advantage of the nation's peacetime optimism. With his characteristic wit and perception, Mark Twain and his collaborator, Charles Dudley Warner, attack the greed, lust, and naiveté of their own time in a work that endures as a valuable social document and one of America's most important satirical novels.

Die Frau ist für gewisse Zeit beruflich im Ausland, und nun hat Dirk ärgerlicherweise neben der eigentlichen auch die Familienarbeit an der Hacke, konkret: den gemeinsamen Sohn Hermann. Die Doppelbelastung ist auf Dauer nicht zu leisten, ein Babysitter muss her. Freunde hatten, sehr modern, einen männlichen, der Mann war Ukrainer, sehr freundlich und auch gebildet, immer ein Zitat von Joseph Roth auf den Lippen. Und Dirk entscheidet sich bei der Suche: gegen die ganzen blonden jungen Frauen und für Maksym, der allerdings nicht so der Typus Josepf-Roth-Zitierer ist.

Every summer, a once-sort-of-famous cartoonist named Rich Fischer leaves his wife and two kids behind to teach a class at a weeklong arts conference in a charming New England beachside town. It's a place where, every year, students - nature poets and driftwood sculptors, widowed seniors, teenagers away from home for the first time - show up to study with an esteemed faculty.

Finbar Dolan is lost and lonely. Except he doesn’t know it. Despite escaping his blue-collar Boston upbringing to carve out a mildly successful career at a Madison Avenue ad agency, he’s a bit of a mess and closing in on 40. He’s recently called off a wedding. Now, a few days before Christmas, he’s forced to cancel a long-postponed vacation in order to write, produce, and edit a Superbowl commercial for his diaper account in record time. Fortunately, it gets worse....

Ben Jewell has hit a breaking point. His 10-year-old son, Jonah, has severe autism, and Ben and his wife, Emma, are struggling to cope. When Ben and Emma fake a separation - a strategic decision to further Jonah's case in an upcoming tribunal - Ben and Jonah move in with Georg, Ben's elderly father. In a small house in North London, three generations of men - one who can't talk, two who won't - are thrown together.