The Book of the Year 2019

'My favourite geeks. Hilarious. Sideways. Brilliant.' Tim Minchin

In a year when South Korea announced that its new robotics museum will be built by robots, and French cheese terrorists put a camembert through every French MP's letterbox, The Book of the Year returns with another dose of barely believable yet bona fide facts and stories from the past twelve months.

Each week for the past five years, Dan, James, Anna and Andy – the creators of the award-winning, chart-topping comedy podcast No Such Thing as a Fish – have wowed each other and millions of listeners with the most astonishing trivia they have learned over the previous seven days. Now, once again, they have scoured the newspapers for hidden gems, and transformed another year's worth of weird and wonderful happenings into one uplifting book that you won't be able to put down.

Discover how TV channel Hallmark has so many new Christmas movies that it will now start airing them from July.

Be amused to learn that a thousand people were hired to attend a rally in Kiev to protest against the practice of hiring people to attend rallies.

Share the excitement of the scientists who discovered that more attractive monkeys have smaller testicles.

Revel in the news that Carlsberg launched a new advertising campaign admitting it is 'probably not the best beer in the world'.

Feel a little sympathy for Ariana Grande, who got a Japanese tattoo she intended to say 'Seven Rings' but that actually ended up reading 'small charcoal grill'.

From ecologically minded Birmingham drug dealers to dodgy Belgian petanque players, The Book of the Year 2019 is an eye-opening tour of yet another incredible year you didn't know you'd lived through. And the authors have promised not to mention Brexit. Much.

No Such Thing as a Fish is a team of researchers who work on the BBC TV show QI. Each week they gather together in their Covent Garden office and record a podcast discussing the most interesting facts they’ve discovered over the previous seven days.

In the five years since it launched, the show has been downloaded more than 200 million times, won multiple awards, been transformed into the spin-off topical BBC Two TV series No Such Thing as the News, performed national and international tours (including selling out the Hammersmith Apollo and the Sydney Opera House along the way), and was named one of iTunes’ top 10 most downloaded podcasts of 2016, 2017 and 2018.

The team is made up of James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, Anna Ptaszynski and Dan Schreiber.

James is a script editor on QI, with a dozen series and seven bestselling books under his belt. He has also appeared on TV quiz shows Fifteen to One and Only Connect, reaching the semi-finals in the latter and embarrassingly crashing out of the former.

Andrew is a writer and comedian who also contributes to Private Eye magazine. His first novel, The Last Day, will be published in spring 2020. His nickname among No Such Thing as a Fish fans is ‘Lightning’ (or so he claims).

Anna is a script editor on QI who has previously worked in Scottish politics and Australian advertising, as well as selling fruit wine and hay-baling in the Highlands. She refuses to join Twitter. #GetAnnaOnTwitter

Dan is a comedian and producer who co-created the award-winning BBC Radio 4 series The Museum of Curioisty; has fronted numerous TV shows, including his own Channel 4 documentary; and, as a stand-up, saw his debut show named at the time as one of the top 100 most favourably reviewed shows of the Edinburgh Fringe. He ranked 100th.