The Secret Diary &; Growing Pains of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4

I've never experienced a greater sense of recognition than when reading The Secret Diary -- David Nicholls Townsend's writing is still a delight, Adrian's poetry is still dreadful, and his sense of self-importance is still hilarious * Radio Times * 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 * Very funny indeed * Sunday Times * Townsend has held a mirror up to the nation and made us happy to laugh at what we see in it * Sunday Telegraph * Every sentence is witty and well thought out, and the whole has reverberations beyond itself * The Times * One of the great comic creations * Daily Mirror * A classic. The Adrian Mole diaries are thoroughly subversive. A true hero for our time * Richard Ingrams * Adrian Mole is one of literature's great underachievers; his tragedy is that he knows it and the sadness of this undercuts the humour and makes us laugh not until, but while, it hurts * Daily Mail * 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 133/4, 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.