The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4

Sue Townsend

Jan 2012 · Penguin · Narrated by Stephen Mangan

About this audiobook

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the first publication of Sue Townsend's Adrian Mole, Penguin Audiobooks are re-releasing the audiobook edition of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4 in downloadable audio. This classic of comic fiction is hilariously read by Stephen Mangan, who played Adrian Mole in the The Cappuccino Years and also starred in The Green Wing as the hapless Guy Secretan.

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.

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.