TheSecret Diary & Growing Pains of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾

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 writers' 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 13¾, Sue continued to make the nation laugh and prick its conscience. She wrote seven further volumes of Adrian's diaries and five other popular novels - including The Queen and I, Number Ten and The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year - and numerous well received plays. Sue passed away in 2014 at the age of sixty-eight. She remains widely regarded as Britain's favourite comic writer.

I've never experienced a greater sense of recognition than when reading The Secret Diary

Townsend's writing is still a delight, Adrian's poetry is still dreadful, and his sense of self-importance is still hilariousI 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 readingVery funny indeedTownsend has held a mirror up to the nation and made us happy to laugh at what we see in itEvery sentence is witty and well thought out, and the whole has reverberations beyond itselfOne of the great comic creationsA classic. The Adrian Mole diaries are thoroughly subversive. A true hero for our timeAdrian 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 hurtsThe funniest person in the world

'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.
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'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.