The Penguin Podcast is back! Listen Now
The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole

The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole

Adrian Mole Book 2

Summary

The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole is the second book in Sue Townsend's brilliantly funny Adrian Mole series.

Sunday July 18th
My father announced at breakfast that he is going to have a vasectomy. I pushed my sausages away untouched.


In this second instalment of teenager Adrian Mole's diaries, the Mole family is in crisis and the country is beating the drum of war. While his parents have reconciled after both embarked on disastrous affairs, Adrian is shocked to learn of his mother's pregnancy.

And even though at the mercy of his rampant hormones and the fickle whims of the divine Pandora, a victim of a broken home and his own tortured (though unrecognised) genius, Adrian continues valiantly to chronicle the pains and pleasures of a misspent adolescence.
________

'Funny, moving and a poke in the eye for adult morality' Sunday Express

'Written with great verve, and showing an uncanny understanding of the young, Sue Townsend holds the balance between innocence and precocity and the result is both hilarious and salutary'
Daily Telegraph

'Life's no fun for an adolescent intellectual. For the reader it's a hoot' New Statesman

Reviews

  • Every sentence is witty and well thought out, and the whole has reverberations beyond itself
    The Times

About the author

Sue Townsend

Sue Townsend was, and remains, Britain's favourite comic novelist.

For over thirty years, after the publication of her instant and iconic bestseller The Secret Diaries of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾ in 1982, she made us weep with laughter and pricked the nation's conscience. Seven further volumes of Adrian's diaries followed, and all were highly acclaimed bestsellers.

She also published five other hugely popular novels - including The Queen and I and The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year - as well as writing numerous well-received plays. Remarkably, Sue did not learn to read until she was eight and left school with no qualifications. As beloved by critics as she was by readers the length and breadth of the nation, she chronicled the lives of ordinary people in Britain through times of upheaval and great social change.

She lived in Leicester all her Life, dying in the city that she loved in 2014.
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more