The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾

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His loyal friend and co-worker Bernard Hopkins comes to the rescue, moving in with him and promising to remain until his cancer is in remission. Instead, he finds himself the child of a mother who lives big, loves big, wears bright colors and makes friends wherever she goes. Yes, you can find the latest and all other books in the Adrian Mole series by Sue Townsend on our site. Pauline temporarily marries her younger lodger Martin Muffet, who eventually leaves her for Adrian's girlfriend Bianca Dartington, giving Adrian and his mother a shared heartbreak.

Despite the television series casting its lead bespectacled, Adrian makes no reference in his first diary to wearing spectacles nor attending opticians’ appointments. Characters who had stepped out of the series are back where they were, little details are forgotten. In October 2009 the Leicester Mercury featured an interview with Townsend where she discussed the new Mole book and her plans for future works. Set contemporaneously, as all the diaries are, it fills in two of the gap years between Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years and Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction.

In this second instalment of teenager Adrian Mole's diaries, the Mole family is in crisis and the country is beating the drum of war. He thanks his father after learning that he raised him single-handedly during the first year of his life when Pauline was suffering from postpartum depression. In dealing with political events, a constant plot device is that Adrian makes confident predictions and statements that are known to be wrong by the reader, ranging from belief in the Hitler Diaries to an Iraqi victory in the Gulf War and the existence of their weapons of mass destruction.

A successful stage production ran at the Wyndham's Theatre, London, in 1984-1986, that included Simon Gipps-Kent and followed with a road tour. However, I only thoroughly enjoyed the first two books as the other six started to get get a bit boring and there was no comedy parts that made me laugh. Set in Leicester in the UK of the 1980s, the quibbles of the lead and the setting are all too familiar whether one is in London or Miami during those years.For those new to the series, the first book to begin with is "The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾". More importantly, I believed in this characters all over again and was sad when it came to the last page.

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. First a radio series, then the bestselling novel, Sue also adapted her book for a successful stage play with songs, which ran at the Wyndham’s Theatre in London’s West End between 1984-6.The book has been inscribed and signed by the author to the front blank end-paper : 'To Joan, with very best wishes , from Sue Townsend, Hope you enjoy Adrian's secrets! My mother found them; they were hidden under a crumb of fruitcake”) and self-evident in The Weapons of Mass Destruction. Titled "Mole Cooks his Goose" it covered a stay by Adrian and Jojo at his mother's house over Christmas.