Praise for Adrian Mole:
‘Adrian Mole really is a brilliant comic creation’ The Times
‘Every sentence is witty and well thought out, and the whole has reverberations beyond itself’ The Times
‘The publishers could offer a money back guarantee if you don’t laugh and be sure they wouldn’t have to write a single cheque’ Jeremy Paxman
‘A classic. The Adrian Mole diaries are thoroughly subversive. A true hero for our time’ Richard Ingrams
‘The real greatness of Townsend’s creation comes from the gap between aspiration and reality. Adrian Mole is one of literature’s great underachievers; his tragedy is that he knows it and the sadness of this undercuts the humour and makes us laugh not until, but while, it hurts’ Daily Mail
‘Adrian Mole is one of the great comic characters of our time . . . [Townsend] never writes a sentence which doesn’t ring true; she never gets Adrian’s voice wrong or attributes a thought or feeling to him which strikes one as false. Whatever happens, we may be sure that new troubles will assail Adrian, that new disasters will threaten, but that he will survive them all. Like Evelyn Waugh’s Captain Grimes, Adrian is "one of the immortals" and the series of his diaries the comic masterpiece of our time’ Scotsman
Praise for The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾:
‘I not only wept, I howled and hooted and had to get up and walk around the room and wipe my eyes so that I could go on reading’ Tom Sharpe
Praise for The True Confessions of Adrian Albert Mole:
‘Wonderfully funny and sharp as knives’ Sunday Times
Praise for Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years:
‘A very, very funny book’ Sunday Times
Praise for Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years:
‘I can’t remember a more relentlessly funny book’ Daily Mirror
Praise for Adrian Mole: The Lost Diaries:
‘Very funny indeed. A satire of our times’ Sunday Times
Praise for Adrian Mole and The Weapons of Mass Destruction:
‘The funniest book of the year. I can think of no more comical read’ Jeremy Paxman, Sunday Telegraph
Praise for Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years:
‘Brilliant, sharp, honest, moving, an exquisite social comedy’ Daily Telegraph
Praise for Queen Camilla:
‘Wickedly satirical, mad, ferociously farcical, subversive. Great stuff’ Daily Mail
Praise for The Queen and I:
‘Absorbing, entertaining . . . the funniest thing in print since Adrian Mole’ Ruth Rendell, Daily Telegraph
Praise for Number Ten:
‘A delight. Genuinely funny . . . compassion shines through the unashamedly ironic social commentary’ Guardian
Praise for Public Confessions of a Middle-aged Woman Aged 55¾ :
‘Proof, once more, that Townsend is one of the funniest writers around’ The Times
Praise for The Ghost Children:
‘Bleak, tender and deeply affecting. Seldom have I rooted so hard for a set of fictional individuals’ Mail on Sunday
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First published in Great Britain by Methuen 1984
Published in Mandarin Paperbacks 1985
Reprinted in Arrow Books 1998
Published in Penguin Books 2002
Reissued in this edition 2012
Copyright © Sue Townsend, 1984
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover illustration by Jane Webster
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-0-718-19612-7
To Mum, Dad and the whole family
with love and thanks
‘The aristocratic rebel, since he has enough to eat, must have other causes of discontent.’
Bertrand Russell The History of Western Philosophy
