The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4: Adrian Mole Book 1 (Adrian Mole, #1) (The Originals)

by Sue Townsend

Re-issued with the charming original artwork from 1982, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4 will rouse the nostalgia of a nation who have Sue Townsend firmly in their hearts.

Tuesday January 1st
Bank Holiday in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. These are my New Year's resolutions: 1. I will help the blind across the road; 2. I will hang my trousers up; 3. I will put the sleeves back on my records; 4. I will not start smoking; 5. I will stop squeezing my spots; 6. I will be kind to the dog; 7. I will help the poor and ignorant; 8. After hearing the disgusting noises from downstairs last night. I have also vowed never to drink alcohol . . .

Meet Adrian Mole, a hapless teenager providing an unabashed, pimples-and-all glimpse into adolescent life. Telling us candidly about his parents' marital troubles, The Dog, his life as a tortured poet and 'misunderstood intellectual'.
Adrian's painfully honest diary is still hilarious and compelling reading thirty years after it first appeared.

'Townsend has held a mirror up to the nation and made us happy to laugh at what we see in it' Sunday Telegraph

Sue Townsend was born in Leicester in 1946. Despite not learning to read until the age of eight, leaving school at fifteen with no qualifications and having three children by the time she was in her mid-twenties, she always found time to read widely. She also wrote secretly for twenty years. After joining a writer's group at The Phoenix Theatre Leicester, she won a Thames Television award for her first play, Womberang, and became a professional playwright and novelist.
After the publication of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 ¾ thirty years ago, Sue continued made the nation laugh and pricked its conscience. She wrote seven further volumes of Adrian's diaries and five other popular novels - including The Queen and I and Number Ten - and numerous well received plays. Sue passed away in 2014 at the age of sixty-eight. She is widely regarded as Britain's favourite comic writer.

• ISBN10: 1405919434
• ISBN13: 9781405919432
• Publish Date: 8 May 2014 (first published 1 January 1960)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 9 March 2017
• Publish Country: GB
• Imprint: Penguin Books Ltd
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 272
• Language: English

Reviews

[clq]

As this is a classic and all, I figured I should finally get around to reading it. It was pretty much exactly what I expected, no more, no less. I didn't find it laugh out loud funny, as many apparently do, but it was more than moderately entertaining all the way through.

One of my fears was that this would be too childish for me by the time I got around to reading it, but there are plenty of jokes in it which would probably have gone over my head when I was younger. I probably would have liked it when I was 15, but there is plenty in it for the 26-year-old me to appreciate as well, and I think I like it in a different way now than I would have then.

This is a charming, fun, quick, easy-to-read book which everyone should probably get around to eventually. But there's no rush.