Adrian Mole
4 primary works • 9 total works
Book 1
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.
Book 4
'A classic. The Adrian Mole diaries are thoroughly subversive. A true hero for our time' Richard Ingrams
'My comfort read. The best diaries ever written - with apologies to Samuel Pepys, Bridget Jones and me' ADAM KAY
The FOURTH book in Adrian Mole's diaries, where we catch up with a hapless Adrian and his desperate attempts to win back the love of his life.
__________
Thursday January 3rd
I have the most terrible problems with my sex life. It all boils down to the fact that I have no sex life. At least not with another person.
Finally given the heave-ho by Pandora, Adrian Mole finds himself in the unenviable situation of living with the love-of-his-life as she goes about shacking up with other men.
Worse, as he slides down the employment ladder, from deskbound civil servant in Oxford to part-time washer-upper in Soho, he finds that critical reception for his epic novel, Lo! The Flat Hills of My Homeland, is not quite as he might have hoped.
But Adrian is about to discover that extraordinary and wonderful things may blossom even in the wilderness . . .
__________
'A very, very funny book' Sunday Times
'The funniest person in the world' Caitlin Moran
Book 6
Book 8
The sensational final instalment in comic legend Sue Townsend's hilarious and iconic Adrian Mole series
'Effortlessly hilarious. Brilliant satire and tragedy' Times
'My comfort read. The best diaries ever written - with apologies to Samuel Pepys, Bridget Jones and me' ADAM KAY
Read as Adrian continues to struggle with his love life, endures a painfully awkward school play and contemplates the unsettling prospect of applying genital poultice . . .
__________
Sunday 1st July
NO SMOKING DAY. A momentous day! Smoking in a public place or place of work is forbidden in England. Though if you are a prisoner, an MP or a member of the Royal Family you are exempt.
Adrian Mole is thirty-nine and a quarter. He lives in the country in a semi-detached converted pigsty with his wife Daisy and their daughter. His parents George and Pauline live in the adjoining pigsty. But all is not well.
The secondhand bookshop in which Adrian works is threatened with closure. The spark has fizzled out of his marriage. His mother is threatening to write her autobiography (A Girl Called Shit). And Adrian's nightly trips to the lavatory have become alarmingly frequent . . .
This laugh-out-loud final chapter in Adrian's story will have you hooked from the first page as you discover what he gets up to next.
__________
'A tour de force by a comic genius and if it isn't the best book published this year, I'll eat my bookshelf' Daily Mail, Books of the Year
'Hilarious. Comic gold' Sunday Times
'The funniest person in the world' Caitlin Moran
THE GROWING PAINS OF ADRIAN MOLE is the second in the series to be a part of Penguin's Sue Townsend repackaging programme. A chance to sell Sue Townsend to a whole new audience!
The troubled teenager continues to struggle valiantly against the slings and arrows of growing up and his own family's attempts to scar him for life. In between the ups and downs of his relationship with the divine Pandora and worrying that his genius is going unrecognized, Adrian Mole chronicles the pains and pleasures of a misspent adolescence.
'The new book takes up the diary where the last left off, and is quite as classic' Financial Times
Adrian Mole has grown up. At least that's what it says on his passport. But living at home, clinging to his threadbare cuddly rabbit 'Pinky', working as a paper pusher for the DoE and pining for the love of his life Pandora has proved to him that adulthood isn't quite what he hoped it would be. Still, intellectual poets can't always have things their own way ...
'The funniest person in the world' Caitlin Moran
'My comfort read. The best diaries ever written - with apologies to Samuel Pepys, Bridget Jones and me' ADAM KAY
FEATURED IN 'THE 100 BOOKS THAT SHAPED OUR WORLD' BBC ARTS
The FIRST TWO BOOKS in the hilarious and iconic Adrian Mole series from comic legend Sue Townsend.
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Friday January 2nd
I felt rotten today. It's my mother's fault for singing 'My Way' at two o'clock in the morning at the top of the stairs. Just my luck to have a mother like her. There is a chance my parents could be alcoholics. Next year I could be in a children's home.
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', his love for the divine Pandora and his horror at learning of his mother's pregnancy, Adrian's painfully honest diary is a hilarious and heartfelt chronicle of misspent adolescence.
_________
'I've never experienced a greater sense of recognition than when reading The Secret Diary' David Nicholls
'Every sentence is witty and well thought out, and the whole has reverberations beyond itself' The Times
'Townsend has held a mirror up to the nation and made us happy to laugh at what we see in it' Sunday Telegraph
'One of the great comic creations' Daily Mirror
THE SECRET DIARY OF ADRIAN MOLE IS NOW A MAJOR MUSICAL
Features the complete texts of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾ and The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole.
'One of the greatest comic creations. I can't remember a more relentlessly funny book' Daily Mirror
'My comfort read. The best diaries ever written - with apologies to Samuel Pepys, Bridget Jones and me' ADAM KAY
The fifth book in his hilarious diaries, where Adrian faces divorce, fatherhood and (short-lived) television stardom . . .
__________
Adrian Mole is thirty, single and a father.
His cooking at a top London restaurant has been equally mocked ('the sausage on my plate could have been a turd') and celebrated (will he be the nation's first celebrity offal chef?).
And the love of his life, Pandora Braithwaite, is too busy as the newly elected MP for Ashby-de-la-Zouch to notice him.
Frustrated, disappointed and undersexed, Adrian despairs until a letter from his past changes everything . . .
__________
'With the Mole books, Townsend has an unrivalled claim to be this country's foremost practising comic novelist' Mail on Sunday
'Adrian Mole really is a brilliant comic creation. Every sentence is witty and well thought out, and the whole has reverberations beyond itself' The Times
'The funniest person in the world' Caitlin Moran
'Three cheers for Mole's chaotic, non-achieving, dysfunctional family. We need him' Evening Standard