Books about zeitgeist

Andy, Dag and Claire represent the new generation - Generation X.

Tyler Johnson is a 20-year-old MTV child. Once a baby raised in a hippie commune, he is now an ambitious Reagan youth dreaming of a career with the corporation whose offices his mother once firebombed.

Very evil Very funny. A lethal joyride into today's new breed of technogeeks, Coupland's novel updates Microserfs for the age of Google

Taking the reader on a journey through a country in the grips of a fevered religious radicalism, this title demonstrates how the growing influence of dominionism - the doctrine that Christians have the right to rule non-believers - is threatening the foundations of democracy.

Bridget Jones wants to have it all - and once she's given up smoking and got down to 8st 7 she will. Based on Helen Fielding's diary in the Independent newspaper, this is a novel about a year in the life of a single girl on an optimistic but doomed quest for self-improvement and Inner Poise. First published in 1996.

This title aims to reveal how collective wisdom shapes business, economics, society and nations.

An account of growing up to be a fanatical football supporter.

According to her own complex moral calculations, Katie Carr has earned her affair. She's a doctor and her husband David is the self-styled Angriest Man in Holloway. But when David suddenly becomes good - properly, maddeningly, give-away-all-his-money good - Katie's sums no longer add up, and she is forced to ask herself some very hard questions.

Will is 36, comfortable and child-free. And he's discovered a brilliant new way of meeting women - through single-parent groups. Marcus is twelve and a little bitnerdish: he's got the kind of mother who made him listen to Joni Mitchell rather than Nirvana. Perhaps they can help each other out a little bit, and both can start to act their age.

From the acclaimed author of Hey Nostradamus! comes a wonderful comic novel with more one-liners than a decade of Woody Allen films, about scramble for love and success in a brave new world...

By the author of the best-selling Straw Dogs, this book is a characteristically trenchant and unflinchingly clear-sighted collection of reflections on our contemporary lot.

At 57, George Hall is settling down to a retirement. Then Katie, his daughter, announces that she is getting remarried, to Ray. Her brother Jamie observes that Ray has 'strangler's hands'. This book features a portrait of a dignified man trying to go insane politely. It also talks about the people who fall apart and come together as a family.

It is time for me to turn to England again, for I sense how these memories gradually fade, and it would be a pity if nothing remained of forty years in that country Exceedingly perceptive, at times amusing and always unpredictable, this autobiography of Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti is a fascinating and enjoyable read. Canetti spent many years in London, beginning in 1939, and during which ...

In the BAFTA-winning comedy about the Slough paper merchant where life is stationary, David Brent is more appalling than ever as his personality spirals out of control. His slow descent into semi-madness is chronicled here.

It was the emblematic crime of our moment: On a cold November day in Amsterdam, an angry young Muslim man, Mohammed Bouyeri, the son of Moroccan immigrants, shot and killed the celebrated and controversial Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, great-grandnephew of Vincent and iconic European provocateur.

An extraordinary, beguiling tale of fly-fishing and political spinning, of unexpected heroism and late-blooming love - a Sunday Times bestseller