Great books laced with humour and set around the globe

17th December 2020

Here at TripFiction our database of thousands of books can be accessed by searching for a location, a title or an author…or by literary genre.

A couple of our popular searches are for books laced with humour or comedy. Here are ten of our favourite books in these categories, set around the globe.

Us Three by Ruth Jones – WALES

Friends forever is a difficult promise to keep…

Meet Lana, Judith and Catrin. Best friends since primary school when they swore an oath on a Curly Wurly wrapper that they would always be there for each other, come what may.

After the trip of a lifetime, the three girls are closer than ever. But an unexpected turn of events shakes the foundation of their friendship to its core, leaving their future in doubt – there’s simply too much to forgive, let alone forget. An innocent childhood promise they once made now seems impossible to keep . . .

Packed with all the heart and empathy that made Ruth’s name as a screenwriter and now author, Us Three is a funny, moving and uplifting novel about life’s complications, the power of friendship and how it defines us all.

Prepare to meet characters you’ll feel you’ve known all your life – prepare to meet Us Three.

Straight Man by Richard Russo – PENNSYLVANIA

In this uproarious new novel, Richard Russo performs his characteristic high-wire walk between hilarity and heartbreak. Russo’s protagonist is William Henry Devereaux, Jr., the reluctant chairman of the English department of a badly underfunded college in the Pennsylvania rust belt. Devereaux’s reluctance is partly rooted in his character–he is a born anarchist– and partly in the fact that his department is more savagely divided than the Balkans.

In the course of a single week, Devereaux will have his nose mangled by an angry colleague, imagine his wife is having an affair with his dean, wonder if a curvaceous adjunct is trying to seduce him with peach pits, and threaten to execute a goose on local television.  All this while coming to terms with his philandering father, the dereliction of his youthful promise, and the ominous failure of certain vital body functions.

In short, Straight Man is classic Russo–side-splitting and true-to-life, witty, compassionate, and impossible to put down.

Florence of Arabia by Christopher Buckley – QATAR

The bestselling author who made mincemeat of political correctness in Thank You for Smoking, conspiracy theories in Little Green Men, and Presidential indiscretions No Way to Treat a First Lady now takes on the hottest topic in the entire world-Arab-American relations-in a blistering comic novel sure to offend the few it doesn’t delight.

Appalled by the punishment of her rebellious friend Nazrah, youngest and most petulant wife of Prince Bawad of Wasabia, Florence Farfarletti decides to draw a line in the sand. As Deputy to the deputy assistant secretary for Near East Affairs, Florence invents a far-reaching, wide-ranging plan for female emancipation in that part of the world.

The U.S. government, of course, tells her to forget it. Publicly, that is. Privately, she’s enlisted in a top-secret mission to impose equal rights for the sexes on the small emirate of Matar (pronounced “Mutter”), the “Switzerland of the Persian Gulf.” Her crack team: a CIA killer, a snappy PR man, and a brilliant but frustrated gay bureaucrat. Her weapon: TV shows.

The lineup on TV Matar includes A Thousand and One Mornings, a daytime talk show that features self-defense tips to be used against boyfriends during Ramadan; an addictive soap opera featuring strangely familiar members of the Matar royal family; and a sitcom about an inept but ruthless squad of religious police, pitched as “Friends from Hell.”

The result: the first deadly car bombs in the country since 1936, a fatwa against the station’s entire staff, a struggle for control of the kingdom, and, of course, interference from the French. And that’s only the beginning.

A merciless dismantling of both American ineptitude and Arabic intolerance, Florence of Arabia is Christopher Buckley’s funniest and most serious novel yet, a biting satire of how U.S. good intentions can cause the Shiite to hit the fan.

Hindsight by Sarah Belle – MELBOURNE

Humour, wit, and just a touch of humility: the swinging 60s as you’ve never seen them before!

The universe has sent Juliette a sign. She wishes it had been an email instead…

Juliette’s career is on fire, her marriage and family are in melt-down, and a red-hot goddess wants her husband. But those are the least of her worries when she wakes up on her lounge room floor in the year 1961.

Without any of her modern conveniences — nanny, housekeeper, surgically attached mobile phone, designer wardrobe, and intravenous lattes — Juliette is just over fifty years out of her comfort zone. But as she takes on the role of a 1961 housewife, with gritted liberated teeth, she discovers an unexpected truth: slower doesn’t mean boring, at home doesn’t mean dull, and priorities don’t mean sacrifices.

As she finds unexpected friendships, a resuscitated love life, tragedy and triumph, Juliette begins to wonder if she really wants to return home after all.

I Told You Not To Go There! by J. T. Holton – WORLD

Travelling the world can be immensely rewarding – expanding one’s horizons and opening the mind to acquire a deeper understanding of our beautiful planet and all the amazing creatures who inhabit it. On the other hand, if you make all the wrong planning decisions, travel can be the source of enormous frustration, disgusting experiences and even physical or mental distress.

But, as with most things in the modern age, the internet has come to the rescue. With literally millions of online reviews, for virtually every hotel, restaurant, and tourist attraction in the world, available at the click of a button, travellers now have instant access to all the information they could possibly need to plan their trip of a lifetime.

Of course, these online reviews aren’t composed by professional travel writers. But that’s fine – as long as they provide honest information and valuable tips, as well as clear and stark warnings about places every sensible person would like to avoid.

This book brings together some of the most bizarre and humorous online reviews from travellers all around the world. And as words alone are sometimes not enough to fully convey a reviewer’s experience, a series of illustrations helps bring many of these incidents to life.

The No. 1 Ladies, Detective Agency by Alexander McCall-Smith – BOTSWANA

Precious Ramotswe has only just set up shop as Botswana’s No.1 (and only) lady detective when she is hired to track down a missing husband, uncover a con man, and follow a wayward daughter.

However, the case that tugs at her heart, and lands her in danger, is a missing eleven-year-old boy, who may have been snatched by witch doctors.

Charlotte Street by Danny Wallace – LONDON

Jason Priestley (not that one) has just seen her. They shared an incredible, brief, fleeting moment of deep possibility, somewhere halfway down Charlotte Street.

And then, just like that, she was gone – accidentally leaving him holding her old-fashioned, disposable camera, chock full of undeveloped photos…

And now Jason – ex-teacher, ex-boyfriend, part-time writer and reluctant hero – faces a dilemma. Should he try and track The Girl down? What if she’s The One? But that would mean using the only clues he has, which lie untouched in this tatty disposable…

It’s funny how things can develop…

The Sat Nav Diaries by Adrian Sturrock – EUROPE

“I had an idea for a road trip; a sports car I shouldn’t have bought; and a wife to point out that what looks entirely feasible on a scaled map can actually be quite a long way away.”

This isn’t a travelogue; it’s much less than that. If you are looking for a font-of-all knowledge encyclopaedic guru that will help you plan your next European adventure, you’ll hate this book. However, if you’ve ever sat in a restaurant and wondered what the life of the couple opposite is like, then this might just be what you’ve been after. And the locations are quite nice too.

Kevin and I in India by Frank Kusy – INDIA

Acclaimed as one of the funniest and most true-to-life books ever written about India, this ‘diary of disaster’ became an instant bestseller upon publication in 1986, and remains a firm favourite with readers today.

When Frank and Kevin first met in an empty Arab airport lounge on their way to India, it was the beginning of a friendship which would take them together across the length and breadth of the Indian sub-continent, ending up in the foothills of the Himalayas in Nepal.

‘Kevin and I in India’ is the unexpurgated, often outrageous, diary of their travels – from the hill-stations of the deep south to the Taj Mahal in the north, from the Goan beaches of the west to the sacred Ganges and the Bodhi Tree in the east. Full of anecdotes, observations and travellers’ tales, the two Englishmen weave a crazy, erratic path through a variety of adventures and misadventures, in constant battle against officialdom, insects, heat, dust, ticket-queues and mad traffic.

Here is the real India – stripped of illusion, but adorned with humour and exuberance. Here is a kaleidoscopic potpourri of fascinating sights, scenes and people, with each day of the journey more exciting, more packed with incident, than the last.

Skinny Dip by Carl Hiaasen – FLORIDA

Set in south Florida in the 1990s, Skinny Dip is a fun and funny tale about a woman, Joey, who is thrown off a cruise ship by her loser husband, Chaz. Joey survives by hanging onto a drifting bale of Jamaican marijuana and is rescued by a six-time-divorcee ex-cop, Mick, who is retired in his early 50s and lives alone on an island off the coast of Miami.

The characters in Skinny Dip, as quirky as they are, are entirely believable for south Florida: the golf-loving, crooked biologist husband who will gladly be paid off to falsify environmental data; the giant “ape man” body guard who steals pain med patches from old folks in convalescent homes, the ex-cop who lives on an island, and the midwestern investigator who just wants to escape the Florida heat (and madness) and move back home to Minnesota.

Carl Hiaasen doesn’t just deliver oddball south Florida characters. He also uncovers the corruption that underlies the destruction of south Florida’s unique ecosystem — the primordial Everglades, which are being strangled by people like the tomato tycoon in this story. Hiaasen, as a native Floridian, has watched this ravaging happen over his lifetime, and he is not shy about weaving it into his stories, much to my delight.

Andrew for the TripFiction team

Join team TripFiction on Social Media:

Twitter (@TripFiction), Facebook (@TripFiction.Literarywanderlust), YouTube (TripFiction #Literarywanderlust), Instagram (@TripFiction) and Pinterest (@TripFiction)

Subscribe to future blog posts