Family Humour

They're a glamorous family, the Caseys. Johnny Casey, his two brothers Ed and Liam, their beautiful, talented wives and all their kids spend a lot of time together - birthday parties, anniversary celebrations, weekends away. And they're a happy family. Johnny's wife, Jessie - who has the most money - insists on it. Under the surface, though, conditions are murkier. While some people clash, other people like each other far too much.... Everything stays under control until Ed's wife Cara, gets concussion and can't keep her thoughts to herself.

The day her children leave home, Eva climbs into bed and stays there. She's had enough - of her kids' carelessness, her husband's thoughtlessness and of the world's general indifference. Brian can't believe his wife is doing this. Who is going to make dinner? But Eva won't budge; and soon she realises to her horror that everyone has been taking her for granted - including herself.

Zoe, a sometime artist from California, has recently lost her husband. Martin, an engineer from Yorkshire, is alone after a messy divorce. Both have ended up in Cluny, central France, on a separate journey to walk the Camino: 2,000 kilometres to Santiago, in northwestern Spain. The Camino changes you, it's said. It's a chance to find a new version of yourself. But can these two very different people find each other?

Meet Adrian Mole, a hapless teenager providing an unabashed, pimples-and-all glimpse into adolescent life. Writing candidly about his parents' marital troubles, the dog, and his life as a tortured poet and 'misunderstood intellectual', Adrian's painfully honest diary is still hilarious and compelling reading thirty years after it first appeared.

Felicity Lewis' 50th birthday party in her newly renovated home, loving husband and daughter Greta by her side, is going off with a bang when disaster strikes. Her father, Franklyn, with his usual impeccable timing, has keeled over and died. For some members of the family, his wife Hazel, for example, Franklyn's death is not the great loss it first appears to be. But when his toxic and inexplicable will is read out, it becomes clear that long-buried secrets are about to surface, starting with the astonishing reappearance of Hazel's long-lost sister.

Life is fraught for zodiac-obsessed fourteen-year-old Cat. First there's a minor bus-meets-girl accident, then there's a boy-next-door suitor who can't take a hint, but the most desperate disaster of all is Cat's crush on the stunning and poetic Alison Bridgewater. According to their star charts, Cat and Alison are the perfect match. To which Alison (woe alas!) remains oblivious. But when the dangerously cool Morgan Delaney wades into the river to save Cat's sketchbook of kissing Disney princesses, she sends Cat's stars spinning.

Would you travel the world with a perfect stranger? Fasten your seat belts for an emotional journey filled with humor and adventure. Bachelor and newscaster Pete McCarney buys two plane tickets for a trip around the world with his girlfriend, but they split up shortly before the trip, and he can't get a refund. In a gutsy last-minute move, Pete goes on social media asking for women with his girlfriend's exact name to join him on the trip. Twenty-one women apply, and the ensuing interview process is both awkward and hilarious.

Meet Grace Bernard. Daughter, sister, colleague, friend, serial killer. Grace has lost everything. And now she wants revenge.

Meet Rachel Walsh. She's been living it up in New York City, spending her nights talking her way into glamorous parties before heading home in the early hours to her hot boyfriend Luke. But her sensible older sister showing up and sending her off to actual rehab wasn't quite part of her plan. She's only agreed to her incarceration because she's heard that rehab is wall-to-wall jacuzzis, gymnasiums and rock stars going cold turkey - plus it's about time she had a holiday.

Dr. Cyrus Mills returns to his hometown after inheriting his father's failing veterinary practice. Cyrus intends to sell the practice and get out of town as fast as he can, but when his first patient - a down-on-her-luck golden retriever named Frieda Fuzzypaws - wags her way through the door, life suddenly gets complicated. Cyrus gets caught up in a new community and its endearing residents, both human and animal. Sensing he may have misjudged the past, he begins to realize it's not just his patients that need healing.

When a Republican party wins the General Election, they strip the royal family of everything and send them to live on a housing estate in the Midlands. Exchanging caviar for boiled eggs, servants for a social worker named Trish, the Queen and her family learn what it means to be poor among the great unwashed. Is their breeding sufficient to allow them to rise above their changed circumstance or deep down are they really just like everyone else?

One day, sitting in traffic, Stella Sweeney attempts a good deed. The resulting car crash changes her life. But in this event is born the seed of something which will take Stella thousands of miles from her old life, turning an ordinary woman into a superstar, wrenching her whole family apart. For the first time real, honest-to-goodness happiness is just within her reach. But is Stella Sweeney, Dublin housewife, ready to grasp it?

Meet Mercy Blain, whose house has just burnt down. Unfortunately for Mercy, this goes beyond the disaster it would be for most people: she hasn't been outside that house for two years now. Flung out into the world she's been studiously ignoring, Mercy goes to the only place she can. Her not-quite-ex-husband Eugene's house. But it turns out she can't stay there, either. And so begins Mercy's unwilling journey.

Perfect for anyone yearning for a simpler, slower pace of life, as well as fans of Dr. Larimore's popular Bryson City series, The Best Medicine is a tender and insightful collection of stories chronicling one young doctor's passage from inexperience to maturity as a physician, husband, father, and community member. Filled with characters colorful and crusty, warmhearted and hotheaded, witty and winsome, these captivating stories glow with warmth, love, and humor. You'll laugh, you'll cry, and you'll wish Dr. Larimore was your doctor.

From the master of tragicomedy and award-winning author of Skippy Dies: a tour de force new novel about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person when the world is (maybe) ending. Irresistibly funny, wise and thought-provoking, a state-of-the-nation novel about one unhappy family in the midst of meltdown.

A searingly honest, funny and moving family memoir in which David Baddiel exposes his mother’s idiosyncratic sex life, and his father’s dementia, to the same affectionate scrutiny. My Family: The Memoir is David Baddiel’s candid examination of his childhood, family and memory offering a twisted love letter to his parents.

Unlike the rest of her family, Maggie Walsh has always done the right thing - that is until the day she leaves her husband and takes refuge with her friend Emily, a screenwriter in Los Angeles - a city where even the palm trees are skinny.

Hester and Harriet are reluctantly driving to visit relatives on Christmas Day when they come across a young woman hiding with her baby in a bus shelter. Seeing the perfect excuse for returning to their own warm hearth, the sisters insist on bringing Daria and Milo home with them. But with the arrival of a sinister stranger looking for a girl with a baby, Hester and Harriet's carefully crafted peace and quiet quickly begins to fall apart....

The story of a relationship that everyone thought was forever and which is now in danger of being for never, The Break is about getting older and staying in love when life, real life, is trying to pull you apart.

Eleanor Oliphant leads a simple life. She wears the same clothes to work every day, eats the same meal deal for lunch every day and buys the same two bottles of vodka to drink every weekend. Eleanor Oliphant is happy. Nothing is missing from her carefully timetabled life. Except, sometimes, everything. One simple act of kindness is about to shatter the walls Eleanor has built around herself. Now she must learn how to navigate the world that everyone else seems to take for granted – while searching for the courage to face the dark corners she’s avoided all her life.