Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years

Sue Townsend was simply one of the funniest writes who ever wore socks, and her Adrian Mole series is a satirical gem that follows her hapless protagonist from adolescence to middle age, revealing some sharp home truths about British society in the process. At thirty-nine and a half, Adrian is convinced he's too young to have prostrate problems. He's wrong. If anyone can shake a comic first at cancer, it's Townsend. * Independent * Couldn't be funnier * Gillian Reynolds, Sunday Times * An exquisite social comedy * Daily Telegraph * In this book the comedy is all the sharper, and more poignant, for its melancholy contrasts, the emotional danger and the sense that time is always running out. * The Guardian * Sue Townsend has always had an unflinching sense of humour - the more incongruously awful the situation, the more she can make us laugh...this is a seriously lovely book. * Sunday Times * Like Evelyn Waugh's Captain Grimes, Adrian is 'one of the immortals' and the series of his diaries the comic masterpiece of our time * The Scotsman * This hilarious and poignant tale of Adrian Mole's early middle age reaffirms that Sue Townsend has created 'one of the great comic characters of our time' * The Scotsman * The funniest person in the world * Caitlin Moran *

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 13, 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.