Another Weird Year: Bizarre news stories from around the world - Tapa blanda

The latest instalment in the corporate adventures of Alex, the pinstriped cartoon character who appears in the pages of the 'Daily Mail'. It's been a tough year for the investment banker: his world is rocked by financial scandals and he faces a fight to keep his job. A collection of Cook's finest and funniest writings - many of which have never been published before. Christmas verse: under influence of gin, turkey and baby look confusingly alike. Why does the baby smell of stuffing? What has the family eaten for Christmas dinner? Hundreds of short stories picked up from the world's news wires during the last year.

Fiction will never be able to compete with the bizarre nuggets of truth continually thrown up in the daily news. This bumper collection of the year's weirder gems, taken from news sources around the world, and organised into thematic chapters (Sex, Animals, Politics, Sport etc.),includes such tales as the chimpanzee who made crank phone calls, the chess game prematurely ended by a flying cow, and the airline pilot who had to borrow money from his passengers to refuel the plane. So forget the endless column inches on economic downturn, this is the real news and it tells you more about life on earth than you'd ever wish to know.