|summary=Poor Skarper. He's such a loser. In the violent and bloodthirsty goblin world where fighting and eating and taking other people's loot are all-time-favourite, number-one activities, he has a terrible handicap. He thinks. In fact, he's pretty clever, for a goblin, to the extent that he uses the goblins' bumwipe heaps for . . . reading. Yup, you heard me. Reading. The foolish hatchling works out that the black squiggles on the mouldering heaps of soft and crinkly stuff left, long ago, by the ancient inhabitants of the tower, are written words, and instead of going out raiding like any sensible goblin, he creeps off to a quiet corner to work out what they mean. Silly, eh?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1407115278</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Etgar Keret
|title=Suddenly, a Knock on the Door
|rating=4
|genre=Short Stories
|summary=In the opening, titular story, Keret is forced by several people to create, and alter, a short short story. It's a plain metaphor for the history of Israel, but it proves that this modern Scheherazade is not too far removed geographically from the original. And what follows are probably the sort of short, tantalising, open-ended, rough-round-the-edges and surreal results of being compelled to carry on telling tall tales on a nightly basis.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0701186674</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Nicky Harlow
|title=Amelia and the Virgin
|rating=5
|genre=Humour
|summary=
Amelia is 13 years old and lives with her mother, brother and extended family in 1980s Liverpool. Con, her great-uncle, is a psychiatrist with prestigious patients and a bit of a drink problem, Great-Aunt Edith is a devout Catholic with an inclination towards eccentricity and her brother, Julian, is a junky. Amelia's mother tries to hold everyone together but becomes slightly distracted when she inherits a convent in Ireland, complete with nuns. Amelia has her own problems, though. She sees visions of the Goddess Irena and is pregnant with the next Messiah. (A girl this time as the original male Messiah didn't have much luck.)
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>095600539X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sue Townsend
|title=The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=The country might be at war over the Falklands but life is hardly straight-forward in the Mole household. Adrian's parents are back together after both had disastrous affairs and it's not long before Adrian is shocked to learn that his mother is pregnant. He's equally shocked to see his father helping Doreen (a.k.a. the 'stick insect') along a path which isn't particularly slippy, although he does notice that she seems to have put on quite a bit of weight. Pandora Braithwaite is as fickle, but adorable, as ever and Adrian's hormones are still playing hop-scotch with his brain. So, what's new?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0141046430</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=John Niven
|title=The Second Coming
|rating=4
|genre=Humour
|summary=God has come back from a holiday and has some catching up to do. What’s been happening on Earth for the last couple of hundred years? The realisation hits him hard... it makes him sick in fact. So what’s the answer? To quote the religious cliché, Jesus is. After a board meeting with the senior saints, God decides that his son must be torn away from jamming with Hendrix to go back to the streets of the world to remind the sinners of the way.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099535521</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sue Townsend
|title=The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Adrian Mole was just three months away from his fourteenth birthday when he began writing his diary on New Year's Day. He's just on the edge of true adolescence - pimples are appearing as is a little bit of interest in the opposite sex. He's thinking about what he might like to do ''eventually'', but his first major challenge is the breakdown of his parents' marriage. He writes with a wonderful mixture of ''knowingness'' and innocence and usually manages to get things just ever-so-slightly wrong.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0141046422</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Bruce Robinson
|title=The Rum Diary - A Screenplay
|rating=5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Kemp has lied his way onto a failing newspaper in San Juan, Puerto Rica, as the only candidate for the job, and in a semi-comatose state induced by too many miniatures from the hotel minibar, stumbles into a conspiracy of epic proportions, via classic bar room brawls and nightclub mayhem. On the way he (almost) writes horoscopes and bowling championship stories, meets the fantastically erotic girlfriend of the evil businessman, and teams up with a proto-Nazi out of his mind on a cocktail of hootch and LSD, and a photographer side kick. There is no question that this is Hunter S Thompson territory, especially when all the above is combined with a witty, slow-talking hero who in spite of his alcoholic haze sees clearly through the exploitation of a third world country by its massive first world near neighbour.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099555697</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Francesca Simon
|title=Horrid Henry's A - Z of Everything Horrid
|rating=4
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=Francesca Simon's Horrid Henry is a very popular little boy, although you might have a different opinion if you actually had to put up with his antics yourself. A slightly modernised embodiment of 'slugs and snails and puppy dogs' tails' concept of boyhood, Henry is naughtiness personified, combining irreverence for authority with a huge dose of gross-out crude humour that really appeals to the target readership of early primary school children. Add a somewhat nostalgic, timeless feel, trademark alliterations, subtle (and not so subtle) digs at family dynamics, sibling rivalry and particularly at modern middle-class manners and sensibilities and you have a winning character and a base for a very successful edutainment franchise.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1444002260</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jeremy Clarke
|title=Low Life
|rating=3
|genre=Humour
|summary=
I'm not a Spectator reader – indeed other than seeing on the shelves I'm ashamed to say that before starting to write this article I knew absolutely nothing about the magazine, its style, ethos or readership. Having (obviously) done the obligatory websearch I know understand that being its editor is considered a reasonable a route to success in the Conservative Party or other public office on a right-wing ticket. A sister publication to The Daily Telegraph, it is quoted as being Atlanticist, usually supportive of Israel, and Eurosceptic in outlook.
This makes me utterly unsuitable as a candidate to review Clarke's book.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1907595511</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Guy Kennaway
|title=Bird Brain
|rating=4.5
|genre=Humour
|summary='It began for Basil ''Banger'' Peyton-Crumbe the day he died in a pheasant shooting incident'.
If you were in any doubt as to the nature of the novel given the cover jacket and the author's disclaimer to the effect that any similarity between the human characters and any real person is entirely coincidental, but he feels safe from any threats of libel action on behalf of the dead animals whose characters he has mercilessly manipulated for narrative effect, then its opening sentence should put you straight.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224093991</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Neil Forsyth
|title=Why Me? The Very Important Emails of Bob Servant
|rating=3.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Catchy title and catchy front cover graphics. What's not to like? It takes a lot to make me laugh generally, but as I had an initial flick through this book, things looked promising. And I was also thinking that it's a pleasant change to see another location (other than perhaps the predictable Glasgow and Edinburgh) get an airing.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1780270097</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Harry Thompson
|title=Tintin: Herge and His Creation
|rating=3.5
|genre=Biography
|summary=I love Tintin. I love his quiff and his innocence, his plus-fours and his foreign adventures, I love Snowy the dog and most of all I love Captain Haddock and the flamboyance of his blistering barnacles language. So I was thrilled to see a biography of the character and Hergé, his creator, and I picked it up with enthusiasm.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848546726</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Joseph Heller
|title=Catch 22
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=At the heart of the very black comedy that is ''Catch 22'' is Captain Yossarian, a World War II American bombardier, who wants to survive the war. Flying repeated combat missions is undermining his sanity, and surely a mad man should be grounded? But if he asks to be grounded, he demonstrates an absolutely sane concern for his own safety. If he is sane, he can't be grounded. This, his doctor tells him, is catch 22.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099529114</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=William Giraldi
|title=Busy Monsters
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=
Charles Homar loves his Gillian. He's proved it to us, if not to her, by going after her possessive, jealous state trooper of an ex with the intent to kill - if only ended up rescuing a cat instead. But lo and behold, she's declared she's off to discover the real love of her life - the giant squid. Failing to stop this, Charlie spends too long with a Nessie obsessive, then goes on a hunt of his own - for Bigfoot, all the while, chapter by chapter, sending his narrative of the same to a magazine as essays for one of those autobiographical, frivolous columns.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0393079627</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Kevin Wilson
|title=The Family Fang
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=
Annie Fang and her brother Buster are back living at home with their parents - where they never thought they'd ever be again. But it has come to this - her film actress career is on the rocks with the kind of self-destruction so much enjoyed by tabloid writers, and he - well, he's here because of a jumbo spud gun. Neither want life back at home, as throughout their childhood they were used by their parents - without much planning, without any consideration of feelings, or consent - in a whole career of performance art pieces, designed to enact a point of life or just cause havoc.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1447202384</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Zadie Smith
|title=White Teeth
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Some books sneak up on you. Others are thrown at you from every corner of the media to the extent that you almost make a conscious decision NOT to read them, or at least, not yet. Let the furore die down. If they're still around in a few years, your subconscious whispers, maybe we'll go see what all the fuss was about.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0241954576</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=David Lodge
|title=The Campus Trilogy
|rating=4.5
|genre=Humour
|summary=Somewhere along the line the word "vintage" stopped meaning simply the wine crop of any given year, and started to mean the wine of a particularly good year, and then to mean anything of a past year that was (is) of outstanding quality. Such is the mutability of language.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099529130</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Ludwig Bechstein, Axel Sceffler and Julia Donaldson
|title=The Gloomster
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=We've all been there. Finding fault with everything around us, and perhaps picking on one particular irritant that gets us so rattled, tetchy and narked all we can do is invoke "Hell and damnation!" down on all creation - including, of course, ourselves. After all, our lot is so bad it won't make anything much worse.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0571274242</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Stella Gibbons
|title=Conference at Cold Comfort Farm
|rating=4.5
|genre=Humour
|summary=There are no Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm.
To those of you who've not read Stella Gibbons' magnificient [[Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons|original novel]], this is hardly likely to be a major shock - to the Gibbons fans amongst us, though, this is chilling news indeed. And when Robert
Poste's child Flora returns to the farm - now a modernised monstrosity full of members of the International Thinkers' Group – sixteen years after her original visit, the news get graver and graver, as the cows Feckless, Graceless, Pointless, and Aimless have passed away of shame due to the disgrace of the bull Big Business. With the menfolk trying to make their fortunes abroad, and the women struggling, it's left to Flora to try to save the day once again.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099528681</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Stella Gibbons
|title=Cold Comfort Farm
|rating=5
|genre=Humour
|summary=Orphaned at 19, Flora Poste – a London sophisticate – is led to retreat to deepest Sussex to live off her relatives the Starkadders at the aptly named Cold Comfort Farm, a mournful bunch who take her in as they couldn't refuse anything of 'Robert Poste's child', but seem less than happy with having to do so. As she meets the preacher Amos, his over-sexed younger son Seth, his flighty sister Elphine, and the hugely memorable – if barely seen – Aunt Ada Doom, the first person in literature to see 'something nasty in the woodshed' – she resolves to take the family in hand and solve their problems.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0141441593</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Philip Jose Farmer
|title=The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Peerless Peer
|rating=4.5
|genre=Crime (Historical)
|summary=It's World War One, and Britain has got wind of some brilliant scientific research, that has created a new bacterial weapon capable of wiping out the world's supply of sauerkraut. But a dastardly German has stolen the formula. Before he can give a variant based on boiled meat, cabbage and potatoes to the kaiser, his most recent nemesis - Sherlock Holmes, no less - must be brought out of beekeeping retirement. Cue an adventure and a half, as he and Watson take to the skies for the first time in their hectic lives, end up in darkest Africa, and encounter a certain yodelling, long-haired nobleman, more than up to the name of King of the Jungle...
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857681206</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Tom Sharpe
|title=The Wilt Inheritance
|rating=3.5
|genre=Humour
|summary=Wilt is stuck in a job he doesn't want – teaching a subject he's not keen on to people for whom he has no affection – at one of the new Universities. We used to know them as technical colleges. But he can't afford to lose it because of the expense of keeping the quads at an expensive school and of maintaining his snobbish wife, Eva. It's Eva though who signs him up for a job in the summer holidays – tutoring the step-son of a local aristocrat in the hope of getting him into Cambridge – and particularly Porterhouse College. It's not long before Wilt discovers that the boy totes a gun and shoots at anything which moves – or even doesn't move – and that he's an idiot who would probably struggle to get a bus to Cambridge.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099493136</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Alain Mabanckou
|title=Memoirs of a Porcupine
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The protagonist of this novel is an ordinary Congolese porcupine until Papa Kibandi performs an ancient ritual involving a hallucinogenic cocktail called ''mayamvumbi'', and transforms him into his son's harmful double. The insecure younger Kibandi becomes more and more embittered as his life goes on, and sends his porcupine to 'eat' anybody he feels the least bit threatened by, a process whereby that person's life essence is sucked out, killing them instantly. Over one hundred victims later and following his master's death at the hands of a vengeful baby, our narrator retires to the hollow of a baobab tree where he writes this confessional.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846687675</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Tom Holt
|title=Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Sausages
|rating=5
|genre=Fantasy
|summary=Imagine a world where pigs can do quantum mechanics, and where female solicitors turn into chickens. Add a dry cleaner that moves (literally, from the roof tiles to the basement) from town to town every forty-eight hours, a couple of medieval knights who've fought every day for centuries, and a magical ring (or pencil sharpener, depending on the mood it's in). Stir in a bit of property developing, a thaumaturgical detective and an old man who lives in a cloud. Result? You haven't even begun to probe the depths of this crazy, absurd, complex and hilarious book.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1841495077</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Steve Hely
|title=How I Became a Famous Novelist
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=With an uncompromising title like 'How I Became a Famous Novelist', this clearly isn't intended to be a subtle book. So I can hardly complain when a cynical look at the writing industry swings raw punches in every direction. It just isn't my sort of humour, but equally, if you rave about 'The Office' you will likely enjoy this book far more than I have done.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849015724</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Charles Lamb
|title=Great Food: A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig and Other Essays
|rating=4
|genre=Cookery
|summary=''A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig'' is a collection of food-related essays from the early 19th century, with a humorous bent. They're but a few pages each - a light read to bring a smile to your face, then on to the next little foodie treat.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0241951003</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=ClientsFromHell.net
|title=Clients From Hell
|rating=4
|genre=Humour
|summary=Everyone who's worked as a freelancer has a story of a client from hell - that person who asked for something that was impossible, wanted it done yesterday for a fraction of the usual price, or is just plain angry about the work produced. The website [http://www.clientsfromhell.net ClientsFromHell.net] has collated a number of such stories over the years, and has now published them as a book.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0982473931</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Manu Joseph
|title=Serious Men
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Ayyan Mani is a Dalit, an untouchable, stuck in a flat in Mumbai's slums but hoping, somehow, for a better future for his son. Working at the Insitute of Theory and Research he uses all his cunning and wiles to stay ahead of the game amongst the Brahmin scientists. Does he have the intelligence, and nerves, to convince everyone that his son, against all odds, is a genius?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848543085</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=John Saunders
|title=The Vernham Chronicles
|rating=4
|genre=Humour
|summary=Set amidst the rolling British countryside around Vernbury Vale is the little village of Vernham. Anyone who lives in a village will recognise it immediately, with its cobbled streets and Tudor buildings. There was some damage during the war (which might, or might not have been down to a lighthouse folly constructed by a local landowner on his lake) but the gaps have been filled with some beautiful, er, mock Tudor buildings. Almost unique and nearly beautiful as the village is, it's not the star of The Vernham Chronicles. The stars are the people who live in Vernham.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1907499598</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Martin Millar
|title=The Good Fairies of New York
|rating=4
|genre=Fantasy
|summary=In this fairytale of New York, the Cornish fairy King's children are living in exile, hiding in Central Park from a nasty industrial revolution back home. They have friends from Ireland with them, and all have the ability to startle the local squirrels. Elsewhere two innocent scallywag fairies fleeing Scotland have arrived, and adopted a human each. Heather has joined up with Dinnie, the city's worst busker, a fat, alcoholic and lonely fan of TV ads for phone sex, while Morag befriends Kerry, a dying kleptomaniac beauty, just as alone for different reasons.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0749954205</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Gervase Phinn
|title=Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Stars
|rating=4
|genre=Humour
|summary=I spent many of my teenage years reading James Herriot's books, and I found that this collection of anecdotes and poems by Gervase Phinn had a real flavour of Herriot about it. Perhaps it was just the setting, for Phinn was a school inspector in the Dales for many years, but I think he also has that knack of capturing a situation, and a character, and bringing out the humour without making the person appear ridiculous. Here he collates stories from his other books, some Christmassy and others not, and he relates them with several of his own poems interspersed between.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0141036435</amazonuk>
}}