Adrian Mole

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, and 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.

The troubled teenager continues to struggle valiantly against the slings and arrows of growing up and his own family's attempts to scar him for life. In between the ups and downs of his relationship with the divine Pandora and worrying that his genius is going unrecognized, Adrian Mole chronicles the pains and pleasures of a misspent adolescence.

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…

Finally given the heave-ho by Pandora, Adrian Mole finds himself in the situation of living with the love-of-his-life as she goes about shacking up with other men. Worse, as he slides down the employment ladder, from deskbound civil servant in Oxford to part-time washer-upper in Soho, he finds that critical reception for his epic novel, Lo! The Flat Hills of My Homeland, is not quite as he might have hoped.

It's 1997. Adrian, 30, is a chef at an up-market restaurant, selling down-market food for ridiculous prices. There, the only person who seems to notice he can't cook is AA Gill. But problems abound when, in a fit of madness, he agrees to become a TV chef on the show Offally Good.

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 Mole is 39 and a quarter. Due to his financial situation he has been forced to move next door to his parents. And his numerous nightly visits to the lavatory lead him to suspect prostate trouble. As his worries multiply, a phone call to his old flame ignites powerful memories and makes him wonder - is she the only one who can save him now?