“Townsend’s wit is razor sharp” as her self-proclaimed intellectual adolescent hero continues his hilarious angst-filled secret diary (TheMirror). I can’t wait until I am fully mature and can make urban conversation with intellectuals. Growing up among inferiors in Great Britain isn’t easy for a sensitive fifteen-year-old “poet of the Midlands” like Adrian Mole, considering everything in the world is conspiring to scar him for life: His hormones are in a maelstrom; his mother is pregnant (at her age!); his girlfriend, Pandora, is in shutdown; radio stardom isn’t panning out; he’s become allergic to non-precious metals; and passing his exams is as dire a crisis as the Falkland Islands. From weathering a profound but shaky romance with the love of his life to negotiating his parents’ reconciliation to writing his poetry on restroom walls (why on earth did he sign his name?), “Adrian Mole is as engaging as ever” (Time Out). The sequel to the beloved TheSecret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾ continues Adrian’s chronicle of angst, which has sold more than twenty million copies worldwide, and been adapted for television and staged as a musical. Adrian Mole is truly “a phenomenon” (The Washington Post).

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.

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 is an adult. At least that's what it says on his passport. But living at home, clinging to his threadbare cuddly rabbit 'Pinky', working as a paper pusher for the DoE and pining for the love of his life, Pandora, has proved to him that adulthood isn't quite what he expected. Still, without the dilemmas of modern life what would an intellectual poet have to write about...

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.