It's here! Browse the 2024 Penguin Christmas gift guide
The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole

The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole

Summary

The ORIGINAL teenage diarist is back in the second book in Sue Townsend's brilliantly funny, touching and bestselling Adrian Mole series.

'If I turn out to be mentally deranged in adult life, it will be all my mother's fault.'


Adrian Mole continues to struggle valiantly against the slings and arrows of growing up and his own family's attempts to scar him for life in this second volume of his secret diary.

'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

Reviews

  • Thank God for Sue Townsend
    Observer

About the author

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 ¾ 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.
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more