True Confessions Of Adrian Albert Mole

Adrian Mole's first love, Pandora, has left him; a neighbor, Mr. Lucas, appears to be seducing his mother (and what does that mean for his father?); the BBC refuses to publish his poetry; and his dog swallowed the tree off the Christmas cake. "Why" indeed.

The troubled life of Adrian Mole continues in this sequel to The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4. Adrian continues to struffle valiantly against the slings and arrows of growing up and his own family's attempts to scar him for life.

As his secret diary extends into his later teen years, the angsty Brit remains “part Holden Caulfield, part . . . Bertie Wooster” and all Adrian (The New York Times). Send my diaries back. I would hate them to fall into unfriendly, possibly commercial hands. I am afraid of blackmail; as you know my diaries are full of sex and scandal. What’s happening to Adrian Mole? He’s on the cusp of adulthood and burgeoning success as a published poet. But . . . he still lives at home, refuses to part with his threadbare stuffed rabbit, and has lost his job at the library for a shocking act of impudence: He shelved Jane Austen under “light romance.” Even worse, someone named Sue Townsend stole his diaries and published them under her own name. Of course they were bestsellers. The “brilliant comic creation” returns, sharing his poetry (award-winning!), travel journals (he’s going places), musings on lost love (more of an obsession), and some major news (he’s writing a novel!) (The Times). But not all the confessions are his alone. We also hear from that notorious pilferer Townsend, who, after receiving a suspended prison sentence, now lives in shame in a bleak moorland cottage. Don’t tell Adrian, but the New York Times Book Review still insists that it’s she who “is a national treasure.” From “one of Britain’s most celebrated comic writers” (The Guardian) comes the inventive new novel in the “perceptive and funny” (The New York Times) series that has sold more than twenty million copies worldwide, was adapted for television and staged as a musical, and is nothing less than “a phenomenon” (The Washington Post).

Adrian Mole has entered early middle age and is now ‘the same age as Jesus was when he died' (33). Father to the grammatically challenged Glenn, and William, who takes a ‘Big Boy Arouser’ condom to nursery school as his innocent contribution to a hot air balloon project, Adrian is a single parent who has an on/off relationship with his housing officer, Pamela Pigg. Will she help him to move from the notorious Gaitskell estate before William joins the Mad Frankie Fraser fan club? In the meantime, Adrian continues to be scandalised by his irresponsible parents who are conducting a matrimonial square-dance with the Braithwaites – the parents of the beautiful but unobtainable Pandora, who is ruthlessly pursuing her ambition to be New Labour’s first woman P.M. – and to confide in his diary. His current worries include: indestructible head-lice; his raging jealousy when his accomplished half-brother Brett arrives on his doorstep; moral decline in The Archers; his desperate attachment to two therapists; his mild addiction to Starburst (formerly Opal Fruits); a small earthquake in Leicester; and, perhaps most significantly, the dawn of a new millennium.

All the Mole diaries in one volume, including material from the mature Adrian.

File of original artwork for 'True Confessions of Adrian Albert Mole, Susan Lillian Townsend and Margaret Hilda Roberts' by Sue Townsend. The file consists of a series of draft illustrations for the front cover, including several alternative cover designs, executed in graphite pencil, pen and ink, watercolour and [gouache] (CH/1/3/2); a page of manuscript notes by Caroline Holden for potential covers for the book (CH/1/3/1); a printed book jacket (CH/1/3/3); a complete suite of finished pen and ink internal illustrations, annotated with page numbers and sizing instructions for the printer (CH/1/3/4); and a typescript of Sue Townsend’s text for the Margaret Hilda Roberts section of the book, which contains pertinent pencil sketches by Holden in the margins (CH/1/3/5).

After some forty years on the throne of England to be rehoused on a council estate in the Midlands comes as something of a shock to the Queen. In fact it is a nightmare.