Women Humor

Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom. Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette's intensifying allergy to Seattle - and people in general - has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands.

Molly is terrified that she may lose her farm because her idle husband has left her for a rich hobby winemaker and is demanding his half of the land. Meg enlists Mother's help to find Molly a divorce lawyer, which Mother is all the more willing to do because the unfaithful husband's new girlfriend is the bete noire of the wine pavilion. She is so universally disliked that Meg begins to worry about her safety. But it's the unfaithful husband whose murdered body she and Michael find that night.

Madeleine Wickham is Sophie Kinsella, and is just as delicious as her internationally best-selling Shopaholic series. Madeleine Wickham's bitingly funny and edgy style keeps fans coming back for more. So hold onto your haute couture hats, as you dive into the fantastic world of Wickham!

On a remote archeological site in Greece, the mythic home of the first Olympics, four women discover an unusual artifact. It’s a piece of history that definitely shouldn’t exist. And for the head archaeologist in charge, a relic himself, it means something’s gone horribly wrong.

Aerospace engineer Esther Abbott doesn't believe in love, but she's perfectly happy to hate her annoying screenwriter neighbor, Jonathan. Until she's forced to strike a devil's bargain with him: he distracts her best friend from a mouth-breather ex, and in return Esther will help him with the sci-fi script he's writing. Her patience is put to the test when it's time to fulfill her end of the deal. But the more time she spends with her nemesis, the more hate turns into attraction - and attraction into something much deeper.

Maggie, Eliza, and Tricia Sweeney grew up as a happy threesome in a seaside town in Connecticut. But after their mother’s death from cancer 15 years ago, the sisters drifted apart. Their one touchstone is their father, Bill Sweeney, a famous literary lion universally adored by critics, publishers, and book lovers. When Bill dies unexpectedly one cool June night, his shell-shocked daughters return to their childhood home. They aren’t quite sure what the future holds without their larger-than-life father, but they do know how to throw an Irish wake to honor a man of his stature.

Once again, Fannie Flagg gives us a story of richly human characters, the saving graces of the once-maligned middle classes and small-town life, and the daily contest between laughter and tears. Fannie truly writes from the heartland, and her storytelling is, to quote Time, "utterly irresistible."

As the holidays draw near in Caerphilly, Mother volunteers to take part in a big Christmas-themed decorator show house - each room of a temporarily untenanted house is decorated to the hilt by a different decorator for the public to tour. Of course, Mother insists that Meg pitch in with the organization, and she finds herself surrounded by flamboyant personalities with massive egos clashing and feeling their professional reputations are at stake.

This edition brings together some of Ephron’s most famous writing on a generation of women (and men) who helped shape the way we live now, and on events ranging from the Watergate scandal to the Pillsbury Bake-Off. In these sharp, hilariously entertaining, and vividly observed pieces, Ephron illuminates an era with wicked honesty and insight. From the famous "A Few Words About Breasts" to important pieces on her time working for the New York Post and Gourmet Magazine, these essays show Ephron at her very best.

It’s Christmas, and for the first time in years the entire Birch family will be under one roof. Even Emma and Andrew’s elder daughter - who is usually off saving the world - will be joining them at Weyfield Hall. But Olivia, a doctor, is only coming home because she has to. She’s just returned from treating an epidemic abroad and has been told she must stay in quarantine for a week...and so too should her family. For the next seven days, the Birches are locked down, cut off from the rest of humanity, and forced into each other’s orbits.

Max Jennings is in a bad mood. The secrets from her past make it her natural state of being. Max’s bad mood means that very few people actually truly understand her or know that her dream is to be a pastry chef. When a rare opportunity to work for world-famous Avis Phillips presents itself, Max jumps at the chance. Avis and her staff aren’t stingy with the tough love, so Max spends every spare minute practicing her craft.

As the youngest of four in a tight-knit Jamaican family, Cooper cut her teeth in the mean cornfields of suburban Maryland. Soon she became a charmingly neurotic woman trying to break her worst patterns and reclaim her linen closet. From an early obsession with hair bands to her struggle to escape the immigrant-to-basic-bitch pipeline to her use of the Internet as a marriage counselor (after being fired by two real ones) and the curse of her TED Talk vibe, Cooper invites us to share in her triumphs and humiliations as she tries (and fails) to balance her own dreams with the American dream.

After 10 years of cleaning up the dirt on Atlanta's streets, Callahan Garrity is trading in her badge for a broom and a staff of house cleaners. But, though the uniform is a little different, Callahan soon finds herself right back in the middle of a mystery when a client's pretty, pious 19-year-old nanny is gone...along with the jewelry, silver, and a few rather sensitive real estate documents. Before she knows it, the meticulous Callahan is up to her elbows in a case involving illicit love triangles, crooked business deals, long-distance scams, and a dead body.

Meg Langslow is plying her blacksmith's trade at Caerphilly Days, a festival inspired by the town's sudden notoriety as "The Town That Mortgaged Its Jail". The lender has foreclosed on all Caerphilly's public buildings, and all employees have evacuated - except one. Phineas Throckmorton, town clerk, has been barricaded in the courthouse basement for over a year. But the lender seems increasingly determined to evict him, and may succeed after one of its executives is found shot, apparently from inside the basement.

For Alice and her partner Joe, moving to the sleepy village of Penton is a chance to embrace country life and prepare for the birth of their first child. He can take up woodwork; maybe she’ll learn to make jam? But the rural idyll they’d hoped for doesn’t quite pan out when a dead body is discovered at their local prenatal class, and they find themselves suspects in a murder investigation. With a cloud of suspicion hanging over the heads of the whole group, Alice and her new-found pregnant friends set out to solve the mystery and clear their names, with the help of her troublesome dog, Helen.

An absolute delight of a debut novel by William Kuhn - author of Reading Jackie: Her Autobiography in Books - Mrs Queen Takes the Train wittily imagines the kerfuffle that transpires when a bored Queen Elizabeth strolls out of the palace in search of a little fun, leaving behind a desperate team of courtiers who must find the missing Windsor before a national scandal erupts.

Real estate agent Violet "Spooky" Parker stumbles upon a body-part theft ring at the local funeral parlor and suspects her caustic coworker has a hand in it - or maybe a foot. Can Violet discover what's in the crates that the crooks are sneaking out of the mortuary in the dark of night? Or will she end up in one of them herself - in pieces?

Red Green is celebrated as one of the handiest men in North America. But as well as being a purveyor of inventive practical advice on, for example, making a jetpack from two propane tanks, Red Green is also noted for his insights into that most difficult of assembly jobs, human relationships. Set out in approximately chronological order, from teen dating to the last words of men ("You know, honey, in the last couple of years, you've really packed on the beef"), this is the testosterone owner's manual to every aspect of finding a mate and then learning to deal with her growing disappointment in you.

Is Mothman real, or just another fly-by-night tourist scam? The truth is out there … way WAY out there in this deliciously snarky humorous mystery. Growing up in backwoods Florida, Bobbie Drex has seen it all – from two-headed turtles to two-timing boyfriends. Her life of hard knocks has left her short on cash, but she’s still packing enough snark to give any whack-job a run for his money. Or so she thinks. But when a mysterious stranger arrives at her mechanic shop seeking repairs to his rundown RV, suddenly it’s Bobbie who’s in for a complete overhaul...

After a health scare, 77-year-old Barbara goes to convalesce in the sleepy Somerset village of Winsleigh Green with her sister, Pauline, who is now a widow. The sisters are like chalk and cheese - Barbara, outspoken and aloof and Pauline, good natured and homely - so it’s not long before the tension starts to rise. But when Pauline accidentally knocks down a vagrant who goes by the name of Bisto Mulligan, the ladies find themselves with another houseguest.