Adrian Mole Books In Order

Publication Order of Adrian Mole Books

The “Adrian Mole” series of novels is a set of novels by English comic writer, novelist, playwright, and journalist Sue Townsend. Sue was born in 1946 in Leicester and after leaving school as a fifteen-year-old, she worked several jobs including shop assistant and factory worker. During her thirties, she became a member of the Phoenix Theater, chapter in her hometown, and by the time she was in her mid-thirties her play “Womberang” was the winner of the Thames Television Playwright Award. This launched her writing career and she would write several other plays. But she is best known as the author of the “Adrian Mole” series of novels the first of which was the 1982 published “The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole.” The first two novels of the series made her a bestselling novelist during the 1980s. The novels have been adapted for theatre, television, and radio with the first of the series serialized on the radio. Townsend is also a writer of television screenplays based on the first and second books.

Several of the “Adrian Mole” series of novels have been adapted for the stage and performed in diverse places across the world from Australia to England. Townsend also published a collection of Monthly columns in the “Sainsbury Magazine” titled “The Public Confessions of a Middle-Aged Woman” in 2001. In 1991, Sue Townsend was awarded an Honorary MA from Leicester University. She died from a stroke in 2014 aged sixty-eight.

Albert Adrian Mole is the lead protagonist of the “Adrian Mole” series of novels. He made his first appearance as Nigel in a comic diary in “Simply Magazine” and thereafter in a 1982 “BBC Radio 4” play. The books are written in diary form with some including correspondence as additional content. They provide a humorous and realistic depiction of the life of a teenage boy. They also capture the Thatcher-led zeitgeist of the UK that was one of the most pivotal moments in modern history. Mole was born in 1967 and was brought up in Leicester before he moved to the East Midlands small town of Ashby de la Zouch. He is born to lower middle class, working-class Englishmen and he lived as an only child for fifteen years before the birth of his siblings. He does well in school though he is not that gifted and often suffers from the ire of Pop Eye Scruton the headmaster. While he is not very popular, he has a girlfriend in Pandora Braithwaite and a small circle of loyal friends. He generally keeps out of trouble though he gets in with the wrong crowd at some point. He sees himself as a thwarted Great Writer – an intellectual and does write high-quality diary entries. However, he feels that he needs to adopt avant-garde or other high literary styles if he is to be taken seriously. Unsurprisingly, he has never had his works published.

“The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾” introduces the lead character who like many that came before him is a priggish, pimply, and pretentious teenager. He is about to turn fourteen and decides to start writing a diary since it is a new year. He is the type of boy who believes that everyone including the teachers, his parents, and Barry Kent the school bully will one day pay for not being nice to him. He makes his diary entries over two years, as he tells of how frustrated he is with his parents, his pompous posing as an intellectual artiste, his self-dramatization and snobbery, and his infatuation with Pandora, the most popular girl in school. He also tells of his obsessions with being cool, his self-absorption, getting rid of acne, and his terrible poems. While he is oblivious to how self-obsessed he can be, his behavior is very common in teenagers his age. Just like many teenagers who lock themselves in their rooms writing book reviews and singing pop songs, Adrian is no different. Set in Leicester in the UK of the 1980s, the quibbles of the lead and the setting are all too familiar whether one is in London or Miami during those years. It has its laugh out loud moments and the utter cluelessness and angst of teenage life.

“The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole” the second novel of the “Adrian Mole” series of novels sees Adrian still battling against the travails of growing up. He is now a fifteen-year-old boy living in 1982 and is happy for his parents to get back together, only to suffer the embarrassment of his mother falling pregnant. He is troubled by his acne skin as the summer approaches and he goes on school holidays. He still believes that he is better than his peers intellectually and aspires to become a famous poet and make his fortune from his writing. While his mother heads to Greenham Common with her women’s’ group, his interest in getting into politics is heightened alongside his distaste for the Iron Lady of British Politics – Margaret Thatcher. His parents are struggling to resolve their differences while dealing with their money problems. In the meantime, Adrian is having a great relationship with Pandora though he is still frustrated that things are not moving as fast as he would have liked them to. Adrian gets to experience birth and death, and soldiers on even though he had to deal with all manner of challenges in this final installment of the “Adrian Mole” diary series.

“True Confessions of Adrian Albert Mole” the third novel of the series is set over five years beginning in 1984. Adrian is now a sixteen-year-old teenager hoping to do his A-levels at the end of the year having aced his CSEs and the O-Levels. The novel is written in a different style to “The Growing Pains” and “The Secret Diary.” It includes some content in diary format, some letters between Barry Kent and Adrian, Adrian’s talks on radio, and several poems. Barry his friend has been living at the Royal Palace and learned to write and read which has made him a great poet as compared to Adrian. He has come to be known as “The Skinhead Poet Baz” in some circles, which is quite an honor. Adrian is still corresponding with Hamish Mancini his American pen pal and at some point requests that he give back his diaries. There have been big changes in Adrian’s life though he still has an obsession with Pandora who has been backing off in recent times.