Things Can Only Get Better: Eighteen Miserable Years in the Life of a Labour Supporter, 1979-1997

JOHN O'FARRELL

Biographies & Memoirs

DOUBLEDAY

The Best a Man Can Get

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

A hugely entertaining novel about the art of stand up comedy, This is Your Life was a runaway bestseller in England. O'Farrell's hero, Jimmy Conway, starts out the novel at the London Palladium. He is about to perform his stand up comedy routine in front of two thousand invited guests and millions more watching the event live on TV. He steps out blinking into the spotlights and waits for the applause to die down. He tries to appear confident but he can't help wondering whether he should have shared his little secret with someone by now. Jimmy has never performed any stand up before - ever.Conway, a nondescript thirtysomething with a long-faded dream of telling jokes in public, starts the proceedings at the lowest point in his life - teaching school, spending his evenings with a old and grizzled collection of barroom bores (including his ex-girlfriend Nancy) and generally feeling miserable over never having gotten his one lucky break.Things take a turn for the better when a local comedy legend, Billy Scrivens, with whom Conway has exchanged a fragment or two of small-talk while out running, drops down dead. Interviewed on television, where he is plausibly represented as the deceased's jogging companion, Jimmy suddenly discovers a tiny chink in the door of the closely guarded gateway to fame and celebrity. After snatching a ticket to Billy's funeral (paid for by the UK equivalent of People Magazine, and awash with the rich and famous) he convinces a gullible journalist that he is the latest underground comedy sensation, a performer so principled that he shuns TV and restricts himself to unscheduled appearances at out-of-the-way clubs. A stack of forged reviews from a phantom American tour does the rest. Courtesy of a rave profile in a national newspaper, his career takes off.The subsequent rollercoaster ride whisks him all the way from a best new stand-up comedy award (where his acceptance speech loss of nerve - "Look, there's been a terrible mistake" - is taken as a riotous gag) to a dullard contribution to a nationally syndicated television show, and even a lucrative ad campaign. Success, inevitably, has its downside: the girls are too eager even for sex-starved Jimmy, and the pub regulars are over-awed by his sudden success.Which all leads to Jimmy's big night at the Palladium, an ingenious finish where the carpet is pulled from beneath Jimmy's feet, which is credit to O'Farrell's resourcefulness, and his relish of the comic twist and detour.

This is Your Life

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

May Contain Nuts

<p>Alice and David are worried parents. Are their children falling behind with their schoolwork, their music lessons and the number of sleepover invitations received this month? Or are all these extra lessons causing them to miss out on physical exercise? Maybe they could find a maths tutor who'd be prepared to swim alongside them and explain binary numbers while the children practiced their breast-stroke? This permanent sense of crisis is coming to a climax as their eldest child looks set to fail her entrance exam for the hallowed school on which they have pinned all their hopes. Many mothers can't help wanting to do everything for their children, but Alice takes this controlling maternal obsession one step further. She takes the test in place of her daughter. With a baseball cap pulled low over her face, she shuffles into a hall of a two hundred kids and faces her first examination for twenty years. But it is only once she puts herself in the place of one her children that she starts to realise the sort of exhausting pressures that her kids have been under...</p>

Alice never imagined she would end up like this, so anxious after hearing about the dangers of meteorites that she makes her children wear bike helmets in the wading pool. Her husband, David, has taught their four-year-old to list every animal represented in Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. But the more they push their children, the more things there are to worry about. It seems no amount of gluten rationing or herbal teas can improve their children’s intellectual development, and as Alice’s eldest child looks set to fail her entrance exam for the exclusive private school on which her parents have pinned all their hopes, Alice decides to take matters into her own hands. With a baseball cap pulled low over her face, Alice shuffles into a hall of two hundred kids and takes the test in place of her daughter, her first examination in twenty years. With a comic eye for detail that has sent his books to the top of the British best-seller lists, May Contain Nuts is a funny, compelling, and provocative satire of the manic world of today’s overcompetitive, overprotective families.

May Contain Nuts - Import

Lots of husbands forget things: they forget that their wife had an important meeting that morning; they forget to pick up the dry cleaning; some of them even forget their wedding anniversary. But Vaughan has forgotten he even has a wife. Her name, her face, their history together, everything she has ever told him, everything he has said to her - it has all gone, mysteriously wiped in one catastrophic moment of memory loss. And now he has rediscovered her - only to find out that they are getting divorced. The Man Who Forgot His Wife is the funny, moving and poignant story of a man who has done just that. And who will try anything to turn back the clock and have one last chance to reclaim his life.

Man Who Forgot His Wife

Doubleday Books

Lots of husbands forget things: they forget that their wife had an important meeting that morning; they forget to pick up the dry cleaning; some of them even forget their wedding anniversary. But Vaughan has forgotten he even has a wife. Her name, her face, their history together, everything she has ever told him, everything he has said to her - it has all gone, mysteriously wiped in one catastrophic moment of memory loss. And now he has rediscovered her - only to find out that they are getting divorced. "The Man Who Forgot His Wife" is the funny, moving and poignant story of a man who has done just that. And who will try anything to turn back the clock and have one last chance to reclaim his life.

<p>Many of us were put off history by the dreary way it was taught at school. Back then 'The Origins of the Industrial Revolution' seemed less compelling than the chance to test the bold claim on Timothy Johnsons 'Shatterproof' ruler. But here at last is a chance to have a good laugh and learn the stuff you feel you ought to know by now.</p>

AN UTTERLY IMPARTIAL HISTORY OF BRITAIN OR 2000 YEARS OF UPPER-CLASS IDIOTS IN CHARGE [Hardcover]

An Utterly Impartial History of Britain: (or 2000 Years of Upper Class Idiots in Charge)

An Utterly Exasperated History of Modern Britain: or Sixty Years of Making the Same Stupid Mistakes as Always

History

Europe

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by JOHN O'FARRELL. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by JOHN O'FARRELL

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by JOHN O'FARRELL. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Things Can Only Get Better: Eighteen Miserable Years in the Life of a Labour Supporter, 1979-1997

The Best a Man Can Get

This is Your Life

May Contain Nuts

May Contain Nuts - Import

Man Who Forgot His Wife

Man Who Forgot His Wife

AN UTTERLY IMPARTIAL HISTORY OF BRITAIN OR 2000 YEARS OF UPPER-CLASS IDIOTS IN CHARGE [Hardcover]

An Utterly Impartial History of Britain: (or 2000 Years of Upper Class Idiots in Charge)

An Utterly Exasperated History of Modern Britain: or Sixty Years of Making the Same Stupid Mistakes as Always