Joseph Delaney used to be an English teacher, before becoming the best-selling author of the Spook's series, which has been published in 30 countries and sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide. The first book, The Spook's Apprentice, was adapted into a major motion picture starring Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore.

Joseph Delaney

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Sue Townsend

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. 
 
But little does he realise that his own modest life is about to come to the attention of those charged with policing The War Against Terror . . .

The Lost Diaries of Adrian Mole, 1999-2001

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. 
 
As his troubles multiply, a drunken call to old flame Dr Pandora Braithwaite (BA, MA, PhD, MP and Junior Minister) awakens memories of what might have been and causes Adrian to wonder: is Pandora the only one who can possibly save him?

Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years

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 . . . Adrian yearns for a better more meaningful world. But he's not ready to surrender his pen yet . . .

Adrian Mole and The Weapons of Mass Destruction

Friday January 2nd 
 
I felt rotten today. It's my mother's fault for singing 'My Way' at two o'clock in the morning at the top of the stairs. Just my luck to have a mother like her. There is a chance my parents could be alcoholics. Next year I could be in a children's home. 
 
Meet Adrian Mole, a hapless teenager providing an unabashed, pimples-and-all glimpse into adolescent life. Writing candidly about his parents' marital troubles, the dog, his life as a tortured poet and 'misunderstood intellectual', Adrian's painfully honest diary is still hilarious and compelling reading thirty years after it first appeared.

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4

Adrian Mole Book 1

Thursday January 3rd 
 
I have the most terrible problems with my sex life. It all boils down to the fact that I have no sex life. At least not with another person. 
 
Finally given the heave-ho by Pandora, Adrian Mole finds himself in the unenviable situation of living with the love-of-his-life as she goes about shacking up with other men. Worse, as he slides down the employment ladder, from deskbound civil servant in Oxford to part-time washer-upper in Soho, he finds that critical reception for his epic novel, Lo! The Flat Hills of My Homeland, is not quite as he might have hoped. 
But Adrian is about to discover that extraordinary and wonderful things may blossom even in the wilderness . . .

Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the first publication of Sue Townsend's Adrian Mole, Penguin Audiobooks are re-releasing the audiobook edition of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4 in downloadable audio. This classic of comic fiction is hilariously read by Stephen Mangan, who played Adrian Mole in the The Cappuccino Years and also starred in The Green Wing as the hapless Guy Secretan. 
 
Friday January 2nd 
 
I felt rotten today. It's my mother's fault for singing 'My Way' at two o'clock in the morning at the top of the stairs. Just my luck to have a mother like her. There is a chance my parents could be alcoholics. Next year I could be in a children's home. 
 
Meet Adrian Mole, a hapless teenager providing an unabashed, pimples-and-all glimpse into adolescent life. Writing candidly about his parents' marital troubles, the dog, his life as a tortured poet and 'misunderstood intellectual', Adrian's painfully honest diary is still hilarious and compelling reading thirty years after it first appeared.

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