Adrian Mole Books in Order

The Adrian Mole books are presented as the private diaries of an anxious, self-proclaimed intellectual from Leicester who starts writing at thirteen and three quarters and never quite stops.

Through his notebooks the series follows one boy, then one man, across three crowded decades of British life.

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4 introduces Adrian in the early 1980s, fretting about spots, poetry and his beautiful classmate Pandora while his parents' marriage quietly falls apart around him. Set in a small Midlands cul-de-sac during the Thatcher years, the entries mix teenage melodrama with strikes, unemployment and family rows over politics.

In The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole and The True Confessions of Adrian Albert Mole he stumbles through his mid teens. Adrian obsesses over exams, part-time jobs and his on-off romance with Pandora, and the books add letters, radio scripts and fragments of other people's writing that show how unreliable his own version of events can be.

By Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years he is in his twenties, half in love with literature and half stuck in low-paid work, drifting between lodgings in Oxford and London while his friends and relatives seem to move on without him. He clings to the idea of being a serious novelist, but the world stubbornly refuses to recognise his genius.

The later volumes push Adrian into full adulthood. In Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years he is a chef in a fashionable Soho restaurant during the rise of New Labour, coping with divorce, fatherhood and the return of Pandora as an ambitious politician. The Lost Diaries of Adrian Mole, 1999-2001 finds him a single father back in the Midlands, wrestling with head lice, council housing and the first years of the new millennium, while Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction drops him into the politics of the Iraq War when his son joins the army.

In Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years the comedy darkens as Adrian faces serious illness, money worries and the realisation that middle age has properly arrived. The diary voice remains the same mixture of pomposity and vulnerability, but the stakes are higher and the jokes land alongside moments of real sadness.

Across the series Townsend uses Adrian's limited but heartfelt point of view to chronicle class, consumer culture, sex, marriage, parenthood and shifting British politics. The books move from school corridors and shabby council kitchens to TV studios, trendy coffee bars and overcrowded hospitals, always returning to one man who wants desperately to be good, clever and loved, and who rarely understands how funny he is.