From breathtaking stop-action animation to bittersweet modern fairy tales, filmmaker Tim Burton has become known for his unique visual brilliance – witty and macabre at once. Now he gives birth to a cast of gruesomely sympathetic children – misunderstood outcasts who struggle to find love and belonging in their cruel, cruel worlds.

His lovingly lurid illustrations evoke both the sweetness and the tragedy of these dark yet simple beings – hopeful, hapless heroes who appeal to the ugly outsider in all of us, and let us laugh at a world we have long left behind (mostly anyway).

Will Lightbody is a man with a stomach ailment whose only sin is loving his wife, Eleanor, too much. Eleanor is a health nut of the first stripe, and when in 1907 she journeys to Dr. John Harvey Kellogg's infamous Battle Creek Spa to live out the vegetarian ethos, poor Will goes too.

So begins T. Coraghessan Boyle's wickedly comic look at turn-of-the-century fanatics in search of the magic pill to prolong their lives - or the profit to be had from manufacturing it. Brimming with a Dickensian cast of characters and laced with wildly wonderful plot twists, this novel offers an enjoyable experience from beginning to end.

Saloon-keepers and street preachers, gypsies and steel-walking Mohawks, a bearded lady and a 93-year-old “seafoodetarian” who believes his specialized diet will keep him alive for another two decades. These are among the people that Joseph Mitchell immortalized in his reportage for The New Yorker and in four books—McSorley's Wonderful Saloon, Old Mr. Flood, The Bottom of the Harbor, and Joe Gould's Secret—that are still renowned for their precise, respectful observation, their graveyard humor, and their offhand perfection of style.

These masterpieces (along with several previously uncollected stories) are available in one volume, which presents an indelible collective portrait of an unsuspected New York and its odder citizens—as depicted by one of the great writers of this or any other time.

A freak accident renders an ordinary stock analyst invisible. Though invisibility has its pitfalls, he is able to eavesdrop his way into amassing a fortune in this side-splitting, tear-jerking mixture of fantasy and nightmare.

Flannel sheets. Strawberry ice cream. Making faces at monkeys in the zoo. Dog dishes that say "Good Dog." Carolers singing around a Norwegian spruce. Sun burning off the morning fog. Cabanas.

It's the little things that make life worth living, and they can be found by the dozens in this obsessive, quirky, and utterly captivating compendium with over 950,000 copies in print. A pure, unadulterated listing, it offers not a single explanation, aside, or footnote, but reading it is as irresistible as eating popcorn.

Randomly selected and catalogued over the course of twenty years—and illustrated with joyous and jewel-like precision by the gifted artist Pierre Le-Tan—14,000 THINGS is Barbara Ann Kipfer's perfect antidote to the all-too-frequently-mentioned things we should be unhappy about. It's a celebration of almost everything that's ever made us smile. And that itself is reason number 14,001.

Slaves of New York introduces a coterie of artists, prostitutes, saints, and seers all aspiring towards fame and hoping for love and acceptance. Instead, they encounter high rents, faithless partners, and dead-end careers.

This offbeat, funny, and bitingly satirical novel sheds an incomparable light on the city's denizens and social mores. Dive into the quirky world of New York during the 1980s, where each character's journey is a unique blend of humor and social commentary.

If you could go back in time, who would you want to meet?

In a small back alley of Tokyo, there is a café that has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. Local legend says that this shop offers something else besides coffee—the chance to travel back in time.

Over the course of one summer, four customers visit the café in the hopes of making that journey. But time travel isn’t so simple, and there are rules that must be followed. Most importantly, the trip can last only as long as it takes for the coffee to get cold.

Heartwarming, wistful, mysterious and delightfully quirky, Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s internationally bestselling novel explores the age-old question: What would you change if you could travel back in time?

Firmin is a rat born in a book—a shredded copy of Finnegan's Wake—who finds the books he consumes also consume his soul. He becomes a vagabond and philosopher, struggling with mortality and meaning.

In the basement of a Boston bookstore, Firmin is born in a shredded copy of Finnegan's Wake, nurtured on a diet of Zane Grey, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Jane Eyre (which tastes a lot like lettuce). While his twelve siblings gnaw these books obliviously, for Firmin the words, thoughts, deeds, and hopes—all the literature he consumes—soon consume him.

Emboldened by reading, intoxicated by curiosity, foraging for food, Firmin ventures out of his bookstore sanctuary, carrying with him all the yearnings and failings of humanity itself. It’s a lot to ask of a rat—especially when his home is on the verge of annihilation.

A novel that is by turns hilarious, tragic, and hopeful, Firmin is a masterpiece of literary imagination. For here, a tender soul, a vagabond and philosopher, struggles with mortality and meaning—in a tale for anyone who has ever feasted on a book…and then had to turn the final page.

Lost in the Crowd is an engaging, humorous, and sometimes poignant autobiographical story that will have you feeling as though you are right there with the author - laughing, crying, and stumbling through all the ups and downs of his amazing, hard-to-believe, often hilarious, crazy, heartwarming journey through life - a journey that recurrently seems to be influenced by mysterious forces beyond his control and understanding.

The book is defined by events that occurred in the author's life during the two years it was being written. These events bring the book to life and give it a whole new meaning - a meaning that could never have been envisaged when the writing started in October 2015.

It has been described as a brilliantly compelling quirky book of inspiration, coincidence, love, luck, loss, life, chance, opportunism, emotion, comedy, stupidity, amazement, danger, worry, survival, happiness, laughter, and WTF!

See www.litcbook.com to learn more.

Contains original artwork by chrisriversart.com.

If you’re a history or philosophy buff, this book should be as irresistible as a kebab to a pisshead. So what’s it all about then? History, that’s what.

“Errgghhh boring boring bollocks boring, I had enough of that crap when I was at school. History just went on and on and on and on and on ….. and on and on. Nothing different ever happened.”

Well, that’s where you’re wrong, because I’m going to bring it alive. Not all history books, or even books about teaching history, have to be tedious. I’ve looked under every rock, in every nook and cranny. I’ve searched all over the place and dug up some really interesting little titbits. Stuff not a lot of people know. So stay with me on this one.

I’ve chosen to look at past events from the birth of the planet to the birth of Christ. That’s enough for one book, isn’t it? Well, not really, because I’ve gone off track a little bit from time to time, but I do tend to do that, so don’t worry about it.

If you’ve got a teenager who’s studying the history of this period, download a copy for them now because it’s all laid out nice and clear. But let me warn you, I have in the past been accused of having an inappropriate sense of humour, so if you want a little bit of a chuckle watching me make fun out of everyone I meet down the years, then this is the book for you - and if your offspring is in their early teens, then it probably isn’t the book for them.

As I say, I do tend to stray into the modern day from time to time to bring things into focus, but I promise you this book will surprise you, inform you, keep you interested and put a smile on your face from time to time. I discuss philosophers and philosophy a lot, including ancient Greek philosophers, Chinese beliefs, and philosophy from around the world, but if you think it’s all Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, there’s a lot more here to be discovered.

You’ll be surprised, for instance, at the similarities between the Celts and the Native Americans. The Rosicrucians will fascinate you, as will some of the secrets held by Alexander the Great! It’s high time we had some history books for adults!

Dear Reader,

You have undoubtedly picked up this book by mistake, so please put it down. Nobody in their right mind would read this particular book about the lives of Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire on purpose, because each dismal moment of their stay in the village of V.F.D. has been faithfully and dreadfully recorded in these pages. I can think of no single reason why anyone would want to open a book containing such unpleasant matters as migrating crows, an angry mob, a newspaper headline, the arrest of innocent people, the Deluxe Cell, and some very strange hats. It is my solemn and sacred occupation to research each detail of the Baudelaire children's lives and write them all down, but you may prefer to do some other solemn and sacred thing, such as reading another book instead.

With all due respect,

Lemony Snicket

This Sunday Times bestseller is a miscellany of hilarious and peculiar bookshop moments:

"Can books conduct electricity?"

"My children are just climbing your bookshelves: that's ok... isn't it?"

A John Cleese Twitter question first sparked the 'Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops' blog, which grew over three years into one bookseller's collection of ridiculous conversations on the shop floor.

From "Did Beatrix Potter ever write a book about dinosaurs?" to the hunt for a paperback which could forecast the next year's weather; and from "I've forgotten my glasses, please read me the first chapter" to "Excuse me... is this book edible?"

Here is a book for heroic booksellers and booklovers everywhere. This full-length collection illustrated by the Brothers McLeod also includes top 'Weird Things' from bookshops around the world.