by Sue Townsend
Evening Standard
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MONDAY JANUARY 3, 2000
So how do I greet the New Millennium? In despair I’m a single parent, I live with my mother … I have a bald spot the size of a jaffa cake on the back of my head … I can’t go on like this, drifting into early middle-age I need a Life Plan …
The ‘same age as Jesus when he died’, Adrian Mole has become a martyr: a single father bringing up two young boys in an uncaring world. With the ever-unattainable Pandora pursuing her ambition to become Labour’s first female PM, his over-achieving half-brother Brett sponging off him, and literary success ever-elusive, Adrian tries to make ends meet and find a purpose.
‘One of the great comic creations of our time’ Scotsman
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WEDNESDAY APRIL 2ND
My birthday I am thirty-five today. I am officially middle-aged. It is all downhill from now. A pathetic slide towards gum disease, wheelchair ramps and death.
Adrian Mole is middle-aged but still scribbling. Working as a bookseller and living in Leicester’s Rat Wharf; finding time to write letters of advice to Tim Henman and Tony Blair; locked in mortal combat with a vicious swan called Gielgud; measuring his expanding bald spot; and trying to win-over the voluptuous Daisy …
‘Completely hilarious, laugh-out-loud, a joy’ Daily Mirror
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SUNDAY 1S’T JULY
NO SMOKING DAY
A momentous day! Smoking in a public place or place of work is forbidden in England Though if you’re a lunatic, a prisoner, an MP or a member of the Royal Family you are exempt.
Adrian Mole is thirty-nine and a quarter. He lives in the country in a semi-detached converted pigsty with his wife Daisy and their daughter. His parents George and Pauline live in the adjoining pigsty. But all is not well.
The secondhand bookshop in which Adrian works is threatened with closure. The spark has fizzled out of his marriage. His mother is threatening to write her autobiography (A Girl Called Shit). And Adrian’s nightly trips to the lavatory have become alarmingly frequent …
‘unflinchingly funny’ Sunday Times
THE MONARCHY HAS BEEN DISMANTLED
When a republican party wins the General Election, their first act in power is to strip the Royal Family of their assets and titles and send them to live on a housing estate in the Midlands.
Exchanging Buckingham Palace for a two-bedroomed semi in Hell Close (as the locals dub it), caviar for boiled eggs, servants for a social worker named Trish, the Queen and her family learn what it means to be poor among the great unwashed. But is their breeding sufficient to allow them to rise above their changed circumstance or deep down are they really just like everyone else?
‘No other author could imagine this so graphically, demolish the institution so wittily and yet leave the family with its human dignity intact’ The Times
‘Absorbing, entertaining … the funniest thing in print since Adrian Mole’ Ruth Rendell, Daily Telegraph
‘Kept me rolling about until the last page’ Daily Mail
What if being Royal was a crime?
The UK has come over all republican. The Royal Family has been exiled to an Exclusion Zone with the other villains and spongers. And to cap it all, the Queen has threatened to abdicate.
Yet Prince Charles is more interested in root vegetables than reigning … unless his wife Camilla can be Queen in a newly restored monarchy. But when a scoundrel who claims to be the couple’s secret lovechild offers to take the crown off their hands, the stage is set for a right Royal showdown.
‘Wickedly satirical, mad, ferociously farcical, subversive. Great stuff’ Daily Mail
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Behind the doors of the most famous address in the country, all is not well.
Edward Clare was voted into Number Ten after a landslide election victory. But a few years later and it is all going wrong. The love of the people is gone. The nation is turning against him.
Panicking, Prime Minister Clare enlists the help of Jack Sprat, the policeman on the door of No 10, and sets out to discover what the country really thinks of him. In disguise, they venture into the great unknown: the mean streets of Great Britain …
‘A delight. Genuinely funny … compassion shines through the unashamedly ironic social commentary’ Guardian
Enter the world of Sue Townsend …
This sparkling collection of Sue Townsend’s hilarious non-fiction covers everything from hosepipe bans to Spanish restaurants, from writer’s block to slug warfare, from slob holidays to the banning of beige.
These funny, perceptive and touching pieces reveal Sue, ourselves and the nation in an extraordinary new light. Sit back and chortle away as one of Britain’s most popular and acclaimed writers takes a feather to your funny bone.
‘Full of homely, hilarious asides on the absurdities of domestic existence … What a fantastic advertisement for middle-age – it can’t be bad if it’s this funny’ Heat
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Seventeen years ago Angela Carr aborted an unwanted child. The child’s father, Christopher Moore, was devastated by the loss and he retreated from the world. Unable to accept what had happened between them, both went their separate ways.
However, when Christopher makes a horrifying discovery whilst out walking his dog on the heath he finds that he is compelled to confront Angela about the past. As they start seeing each another again can they avoid the mistakes of the past? And will their future together be eclipsed by those mistakes of yesterday?
‘Gripping and disturbing. Utterly absorbing’ Independent