Recommendations based on "Ratcatcher"

From Holden Caulfield to Moses Herzog, our best literature has been narrated by malcontents. To this lineage add Peter Jernigan, who views the world with ferocious intelligence, grim rapture, and a chainsaw wit that he turns, with disastrous consequences, on his wife, his teenaged son, his dangerously vulnerable mistress—and, not least of all, on himself. This novel is a bravura performance: a funny, scary, mesmerizing study of a man walking off the edge with his eyes wide open—wisecracking all the way.

The hilarious 1980s political satire by Jonathan Coe, published as a Penguin Essential for the first time.It is the 1980s and the Winshaw family are getting richer and crueller by the year:Newspaper-columnist Hilary gets thousands for telling it like it isn't; Henry's turning hospitals into car parks; Roddy's selling art in return for sex; down on the farm Dorothy's squeezing every last pound from her livestock; Thomas is making a killing on the stock exchange; and Mark is selling arms to dictators.But once their hapless biographer Michael Owen starts investigating the family's trail of greed, corruption and immoral doings, the time growing ripe for the Winshaws to receive their comeuppance. . .This wickedly funny take on life under the Thatcher government was the winner of the 1995 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize'A sustained feat of humour, suspense and polemic, full of twists and ironies' Hilary Mantel, Sunday Times'A riveting social satire on the chattering and all-powerful upper classes' Time Out'Big, hilarious, intricate, furious, moving' Guardian

Gussie Fink-Nottle simply must marry Madeline Bassett or Bertrand Wooster will be obliged to proffer the ring in his stead. In a daring attempt at securing the engagement, Jeeves and Bertie visit a rural leper colony.

“A child’s garden of vices, My Booky Wook is also a relentless ride with a comic mind clearly at the wheel.... The bloke can write. He rhapsodizes about heroin better than anyone since Jim Carroll. With the flick of his enviable pen, he can summarize childhood thus: ‘My very first utterance in life was not a single word, but a sentence. It was, ‘Don’t do that.’... Russell Brand has a compelling story." — New York Times Book Review The gleeful and candid New York Times bestselling autobiography of addiction, recovery, and rise to fame from Russell Brand, star of Forgetting Sarah Marshall and one of the biggest personalities in comedy today. Picking up where he left off in My Booky Wook, movie star and comedian Russell Brand details his rapid climb to fame and fortune in a shockingly candid, resolutely funny, and unbelievably electrifying tell-all: Booky Wook 2. Brand’s performances in Arthur, Get Him to the Greek, and Forgetting Sarah Marshall have earned him a place in fans’ hearts; now, with a drop of Chelsea Handler’s Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang, a dash of Tommy Lee’s Dirt, and a spoonful of Nikki Sixx’s The Heroin Diaries, Brand goes all the way—exposing the mad genius behind the audacious comic we all know (or think we know) and love (or at least, lust).

Anthony Powell’s universally acclaimed epic A Dance to the Music of Time offers a matchless panorama of twentieth-century London . Now, for the first time in decades, readers in the United States can read the books of Dance as they were originally published—as twelve individual novels—but with a twenty-first-century twist: they’re available only as e-books. The third volume, The Acceptance World (1955), opens with Nick Jenkins, in his late twenties, beginning to make his way in the world of letters: working for a publisher, writing on his own, and establishing connections across the literary landscape. At the same time, he is making his way in love, as a surprise meeting with an old friend’s sister blossoms into an affair. Meanwhile, friends are diving into marriage and careers, and the patterns of life’s dance are starting to take shape—even as the future steps remain shadowy. "Anthony Powell is the best living English novelist by far. His admirers are addicts, let us face it, held in thrall by a magician."--Chicago Tribune "A book which creates a world and explores it in depth, which ponders changing relationships and values, which creates brilliantly living and diverse characters and then watches them grow and change in their milieu. . . . Powell's world is as large and as complex as Proust's."--Elizabeth Janeway, New York Times "One of the most important works of fiction since the Second World War. . . . The novel looked, as it began, something like a comedy of manners; then, for a while, like a tragedy of manners; now like a vastly entertaining, deeply melancholy, yet somehow courageous statement about human experience."--Naomi Bliven, New Yorker “The most brilliant and penetrating novelist we have.”--Kingsley Amis

As Spud Milton continues his diabolical stagger through adolescence, he learns one of life's most important lessons: when dealing with women and cretins, nothing is ever quite as it seems. In this third instalment, Spud, now 16 and growing up, takes on one of Shakespeare's most popular comedies, 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'.

A FAST-FOOD HELPING OF HUMOR! What is it that makes GARFIELD America's favorite feline? Maybe it's the way he flies through the fat lane without losing his cool or without missing a meal! You'll marvel as GARFIELD finds new ways to evade exercise and beat boredom. But it's nothing that a few airborne sardines can't cure, and feeding Odie a jar of sticky peanut butter is a sure way to a slobbering good time. So join GARFIELD and his friends before the food is gone and the fun slows down!

South Dublin's favourite son thought he could face any challenge - until he was asked to cross the bridge over the River Dargle. For Ross O'Carroll-Kelly - schools rugby hero, celebrated bon vivant and lover of beautiful women - life has suddenly become complicated. His father has been accused of rigging a General Election, his seventy-year-old mother is about to bring six surrogate babies into the world, and his daughter is being hailed as 'Ireland's answer to Greta Thunberg', telling everyone who cares to listen that the end of the world is nigh. As if that wasn't bad enough, the Greatest Rugby Player Never to Play for Ireland has a nagging sense that he has to more to contribute to the beautiful game. Now he's been offered a job coaching an underachieving school who've been waiting almost a century for their moment of glory. The challenge is to persuade a collection of jokers, chokers and forty-a-day smokers that they have what it takes to win the Leinster Schools Senior Cup. The only drawback ... the school is in Bray! Praise for the Ross O'Carroll-Kelly series: 'Ross is a national institution ... wicked humour and sharp observation' Irish Times 'One of the funniest writers in the land' Irish Independent 'Extraordinarily accurate and outstandingly funny' Sunday Business Post

An omnibus edition containing the first four titles in the celebrated series Alms for Oblivion: Fielding Gray; Sound the Retreat; The Sabre Squadron; and The Rich Pay Late. There are ten novels overall telling separate stories but linked by the characters they have in common.

Welcome back to Clarkson's farm. At the end of Jeremy's first year, Diddly Squat farm rewarded him with profits of e144. And while he's mastered the art of moaning, challenges still abound. Who knew loading a trailer was more demanding than flying a gunship? That cows were more dangerous than motor-racing? Or that it's easier to get planning permission for a nuclear power station than turning an old barn into a restaurant? Life on Clarkson's farm may not always go according to plan. But not a day goes by when Jeremy can't say 'I've done a thing' and mean it...