It's 1997. Adrian, 30, is a chef at an up-market restaurant, selling down-market food for ridiculous prices. There, the only person who seems to notice he can't cook is AA Gill. But problems abound when, in a fit of madness, he agrees to become a TV chef on the show Offally Good. Yet some things don't change. Adrian's still profoundly in love with Pandora, now an MP, his parents' marriage is in trouble, and Sharon Bott, spectre of the past, returns to haunt the traumatized Adrian, who has enough on his plate as it is.
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
When a Republican party wins the General Election, they strip the royal family of everything and send them to live on a housing estate in the Midlands. Exchanging caviar for boiled eggs, servants for a social worker named Trish, the Queen and her family learn what it means to be poor among the great unwashed. Is their breeding sufficient to allow them to rise above their changed circumstance or deep down are they really just like everyone else?
Meet Adrian Mole, a hapless teenager providing an unabashed, pimples-and-all glimpse into adolescent life. Writing 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.
Finally given the heave-ho by Pandora, Adrian Mole finds himself in the 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.
Sue Townsend, creator of the much-loved Adrian Mole series, tells a compassionate and gritty story of love and loss in Ghost Children Seventeen years ago Angela Carr aborted an unwanted child. The child's father, Christopher Moore, was devastated by the loss and retreated from the world. However, when he makes a horrifying discovery on the heath, he finds that he is compelled to confront Angela about the past. As they start seeing each other again, can they avoid past mistakes? And will their future together be eclipsed by the mistakes of yesterday?
Adrian Mole is an adult. 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 expected. Still, without the dilemmas of modern life what would an intellectual poet have to write about...
For over ten years, Sue Townsend has written a monthly column for Sainsbury"s Magazine, which covers everything from hosepipe bans and Spanish restaurants to writer"s block and the posh middle-aged woman she once met who"d never heard of Winnie the Pooh. Collected now for the first time, they form a set of pieces from one of Britain"s most popular and acclaimed writers that are funny, perceptive and touching.
Adrian Mole is thirty-four and three quarters, almost officially middle-aged, when Mr Blair tells Parliament that Weapons of Mass Destruction can be deployed in forty-five minutes and can reach Cyprus. Adrian is worried that he might not get a refund on his holiday. But that's not all that is bothering him. There's his odd girlfriend Marigold who has become distressingly New Age. And his son Glenn who is in Deepcut Barracks. Would Mr Blair have been quite so keen if it had been his son manning a roadblock?
Coventry Dakin's tale begins with her accidental killing of her neighbour. Forced to flee the law, she deserts her council estate, her boring husband and two demanding children for the anonymity of London's cardboard city. Originally published in 1988, Rebuilding Coventry is a brilliantly observed satire of Eighties Britain and the hypocrisy of the middle and upper classes.
The day her children leave home, Eva climbs into bed and stays there. She's had enough - of her kids' carelessness, her husband's thoughtlessness and of the world's general indifference. Brian can't believe his wife is doing this. Who is going to make dinner? But Eva won't budge; and soon she realises to her horror that everyone has been taking her for granted - including herself. Sue Townsend, Britain's funniest writer for over three decades, has written a brilliant novel that hilariously deconstructs modern family life.
To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the first publication of Sue Townsend's Adrian Mole, Penguin Audiobooks are re-releasing the audiobook edition of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4 in downloadable audio. This classic of comic fiction is hilariously read by Stephen Mangan, who played Adrian Mole in the The Cappuccino Years and also starred in The Green Wing as the hapless Guy Secretan.
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. Writing 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.
