Bookfinder

Are You Experienced? is a scathing satire of the enthusiastic gap year tradition of students heading to mystical climbs to 'find themselves.'

The Caspars are falling apart as George W. Bush rushes towards reelection and the country towards paranoid door-closing. Joe Meno's book not only encapsulates a time in history, of paranoia and suspicion, of lack of faith in politics and maximised patriotism, but he also writes about the failings of a dysfunctional family with humour and tenderness and ballot boxes of pathos.

Skilfully written, well-structured genuine short stories, full of wit and surprise and - in many cases - wisdom. They just also happen to be very, very funny.

Funny and provoking, Lightning Rods is a searing look at corporate life and beyond.

Dave Lizewski is just an ordinary American teenager. He has a MySpace page, he loves comic books, and he is unable to find a girlfriend. Then an idea hits him: why not become a real life super hero?

Nothing, not even TV series The Office, comes close to this book in describing modern office life.

One Night At the Call Centre is a comedic look at modern India's interactions with the West, taking place in a call centre where we learn about the lives behind the voices on the end of the line when we try to change our mobile phone billing plan

No one could accuse John Irving of writing the same book twice. A Son of the Circus takes us out of the safety of his New England safe haven and relocates to India for a bizarre murder mystery involving twins separated at birth,.

Producer and sponger, insider and outcast, master and man fight back and forth in the pages of Olesha's anarchic comedy. It is a contest of wills in which nothing is sure except the incorrigible human heart.

This breakout memoir by comedienne Shappi Khorsandi documents her arrival and early to teen years in the UK trying to fit in. More poignant than laugh-out-loud funny, more tragic and beautiful than punchline-fodder.

Three nerdy Asian kids, sick of being pigeon-holed as too Asian by their private school peers and not Asian enough by their families, take matters into their own hands and carve out a new identity for themselves as Coconut Unlimited, Harrow's most legendary rap crew.

I hereby bet Tony Hawks the sum of One Hundred Pounds that he cannot hitchhike round the circumference of Ireland, with a fridge, within one calendar month'.

This darkly comic, unsettling novel explores snobbery, ambition and personal morality in the 21st century.

Alain Mabanckou's darkly glittering novel is an astringent portrait of post-colonial ennui and contemporary African social collapse, as well as a brilliantly witty homage to the written word.

It’s perfect tabloid fodder right from the start in this wickedly funny and scathingly brilliant Catalonian crime novel.

Assured, audacious, good-hearted, impressive, raucous and funny: these are just some of the plaudits that greeted Zadie Smithís exuberant and incredibly successful debut novel.

Hilarious and gruesome by turns, Auslander's excursion into the mind of a dedicated paranoiac and self-obsessed neurotic fully merits an award for Book of the Year

Pedro Juan is a reporter in Havana, but as existence in Cuba and his own life begin to collapse around him, he gives up the farce of a daily job, and begins to 'train himself to take nothing seriously.'

This is a shocking, laugh-out-loud, nightmare-and-nausea-inducing book; a wild narrative experiment that recalls taboo-busting writers from William Burroughs to Irvine Welsh to Chuck Palahniuk.

Nii Ayikwei Parkes' debut novel is a poetic, dreamy story about the influx of technology and modernity into rural Ghana, and the uneasy relationship between science and spirit.

Wittier than a convention of Woody Allen impersonators, and considerably more attractive, Sloane (I like to think of us on first-name terms) is a sassy, snappy New York girl with a good line in both withering condescension and touching uncertainty.

Milo Burke works in a New York arts college soliciting donations from rich parents. He asks the ask, they give the give.

This collection of wryly humorous stories, admired by Flaubert, Dickens, and Henry James, evokes the vital rhythms of Provençal life and Daudet’s youth in the mid–nineteenth century.

Although the title implies that The Middlesteins is a story about a family, it's really the story about one woman and how her story affects everyone else's

...a moving story about individuals, hopes, dreams and the gulf between what we think we want and what we actually desire.

Ablutions is a collage of anecdotes and stories about a functioning alcoholic serving booze to career alcoholics in a sometimes sleazy, sometimes trendy LA bar.

The book comprises lists instructions suggestions and well... everything in the title from a hilarious generic Hollywood trailer to possible designs for a shawl

The Elephant Keepers' Children is just silly enough to be clever and just mad enough to make perfect sense.

Dan Rhodes' new novel does that Dan Rhodes thing that Dan Rhodes does so well: talk about the extreme light and dark at the centre of the human condition in a wildly comedic way.

Replete with dialect (‘I glegged another look at my watch’), Raisin’s dark tale has an unhinged quality that never strays from its perfectly realised world. Nothing is superfluous in this tense, unsettling and at times very funny novel.

Daniel Clowes’ latest exercise in dysfunctional love affairs smitten by misanthropy concerns the titular, Mister Wonderful, Marshall, a neurotic divorcee who goes on a first date, with the obvious ‘complications’ ensuing.

End Zone is a clever, playful and, above all, funny novel, which confirms DeLillo's status as one of the great American writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Ten Storey Love Song nicely interweaves amongst the tenants of a rough council block in Middlesborough.

This collection of Jon Ronson's best adventures (collated from original sources such as The Guardian and GQ) is a glimpse into the weird and wonderful world around us. Jon Ronson writes like Louis Theroux presents.

Meet Oliver Tate, 15. Convinced that his father is depressed ('Depression comes in bouts. Like boxing. Dad is in the blue corner') and his mother is having an affair with her capoeira teacher.

The comic-strip adventures of Calvin, a naughty boy with a philosophical bent, and his soft toy tiger companion Hobbes, delighted readers from 1985 to 1995. 

A science-fiction mystery, a dark and funny post-modern romp serving further evidence that Lethem is the distinctive voice of a new generation.

The best stories here remind me of V S Pritchett. They carry a heart. There are punch in the stomach moments, laugh-out-loud moments and moments of real tenderness. Barry's ability to fluidity navigate us through the lives of others in such a concise way makes him a master of the form.

The narrator of this book is the eponymous local school teacher Peter Robinson who lives in a dystopian suburb in some unnamed part of America.

Antrim relates his anarchic tale in his usual dead-pan manner so that the commonplace is given the same emphasis as the nonsensical, while humour and imagination combine with madness and mayhem to lure the reader into a zany and farcical  world. 

Readers who may only know Shena Mackay’s novels should sample these delightful stories, thirty-six spread over more than four hundred pages, for their special insights into the Human Comedy. Even more than that, she is the poetic laureate of what one story calls ‘the Gothic of everyday failure’.

David Eagleman’s thought-provoking, funny and frequently touching fiction uses sciencific thought to underpin something we as humans cannot ever comprehend.

Comedy legend Richard Herring compiles years of diaries, blogs and Edinburgh shows in this handy instructional guide on how to turn forty and fight every impulse to lead a normal life, find a girl, settle down…

The Financial Lives of the Poets is very now, snappy, funny, filled with hilarious dialogue and brilliant representations of current zeitgeists.

Part Withnail & I, part Gonzo, all comedy, this bizarre, quirky road-trip tale from ex-Carter USM member Jim Bob is an exercise in wrenching comedy out of a simple premise.

Bed is a grotesquely funny, arch and morbid tale of two brothers, one second-best and the other spoilt and lazy. The spoilt lazy one hasn’t left his bed in over twenty years.

This charming tale of finding a community in a world of internet connections and fast-moving city lives and fear and suspicion is a wonderful look at people and the small ripple effects they have on each other's lives.

The mummy and daddy of all Russian social novels, Gogol's masterpiece is equals parts rambling picaresque, Dickensian social tapestry, absurdist farce and caustic satire.

Pride and Prejudice is an ironic novel of manners. In it the garrulous and empty-headed Mrs Bennet has only one aim - that of finding a good match for each of her five daughters.

Undoubtedly these are stories that take effort and reward re-reading, but they are also playful, occasionally laugh out loud funny. It is a deft and subtle collection that should see Kanai reach a much wider audience outside of her native Japan.