The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 &fraq34; is the first book in Sue Townsend’s brilliantly funny Adrian Mole series, reissued in Penguin’s ORIGINALS collection of iconic teen fiction.

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.

Praise for Adrian Mole (and by extension, Sue Townsend):

’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

’A satire of our times. Very funny indeed’ Sunday Times

’We laugh both at Mole and with him. A wonderful comic read, that, like all the best comedy, says something rather meaningful’ Heat

SUE TOWNSEND

Sue Townsend was, and remains, Britain’s favourite comic novelist. For over thirty years, after the publication of her instant and iconic bestseller The Secret Diaries of Adrian Mole Aged 13 &fraq34; in 1982, she made us weep with laughter and pricked the nation’s conscience. Seven further volumes of Adrian’s diaries followed, and all were highly acclaimed bestsellers. She also published five other hugely popular novels - including The Queen and I and The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year - as well as writing numerous well-received plays. Remarkably, Sue did not learn to read until she was eight and left school with no qualifications. As beloved by critics as she was by readers the length and breadth of the nation, she chronicled the lives of ordinary people in Britain through times of upheaval and great social change. She lived in Leicester all her Life, dying in the city that she loved in 2014.