The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4: Adrian Mole Book 1

Sue Townsend

Jan 2012 · Adrian Mole Book 1 · Penguin UK

About this ebook

'My comfort read. The best diaries ever written' ADAM KAY, GUARDIAN
'Every child in the country should receive a copy on their thirteenth birthday' CAITLIN MORAN
'One of literature's most endearing figures. Mole is an excellent guide for all of us' OBSERVER

**In 2022 Sue Townsend was awarded the Legacy Achievement Award by the Comedy Women in Print prize**

AS SEEN IN THE TIMES
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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 as he writes candidly about the dog, his parents' marital troubles and life as a tortured poet and 'misunderstood intellectual.'

Forty years after it first appeared, Sue Townsend's comic masterpiece continues to be rediscovered by new generations of readers.
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'The UK's bestselling fiction book of the eighties and one of the great comic creations of the past half-century. Impeccable comic timing, evergreen comic writing. I had more pure reading pleasure than from any other book I read this year' John Self, The Times

'Reading The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole when I was 14 felt quite like an awakening' GREG DAVIES, Sunday Times

'Townsend has held a mirror up to the nation and made us happy to laugh at what we see' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

'One of Britain's most celebrated comic writers' GUARDIAN

Ratings and reviews

Read this first was Adrian's age and again several times in my twenties. I've read half of the series and I still enjoy it. Adrian is a year older than me. I'm still sad that there will never be an Adrian book in his 50's or retirement. Rest in Peace Sue Townsend.

Amazingly funny heart worming and great for kids from the age of 10 all the way up to the elderly . Its just great.

It's one of the most humorous books I've ever read. Great work. It's exactly written like it should have been by 13 3/4 year old.

About the author

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 133⁄4, 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.