Sue Townsend Books in Order

Adapted from the first Adrian Mole novel, this stage script turns his diary into scenes and songs, following a spotty teenager as he grapples with first love, bullying, divorce and artistic ambition while trying to make sense of the adults around him.

Adrian Mole, aged thirteen and three quarters, records a year of spots, school troubles and hopeless love for Pandora while his parents' marriage unravels in 1980s Leicester, turning small domestic disasters into sharply funny diary entries.

This play follows Sita, who leaves India with her children to join her husband in Leicester, forced to sell her beloved cow but clinging to her milking bucket and her identity as she faces racism, family expectations and the shock of English city life.

Now sixteen, Adrian lurches between exams, family upheaval and his tempestuous relationship with Pandora. His diary records worries about nuclear war, literary greatness and his baby sister Rosie with the same overblown seriousness, capturing the mix of drama and boredom in mid-teen life.

This omnibus volume brings together The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4 and The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole, following Adrian from his first tortured teenage scribblings through school, first love and family meltdown in one continuous, very funny run of diaries.

Coventry Dakin, a bored Midlands housewife, kills her bullying neighbour while trying to stop him strangling his wife, then flees to London. Living rough among street people and eccentrics, she is forced to confront her own illusions in a biting satire of 1980s Britain.

This volume gathers Adrian's later teenage jottings, mixing diary entries, letters, radio scripts and school memories as he leaves home, starts work and keeps pining for Pandora, revealing how unreliable and unintentionally comic his earnest self-portrait really is.

In a near-future Britain where only privileged classes are allowed to have children, one illegal baby and one state-approved but imperfect newborn expose the cruelty behind a numbered class system. The play blends dark satire with questions about who is deemed worthy to live.

When a republican party wins a general election and abolishes the monarchy, the Royal Family is evicted from Buckingham Palace and rehoused on a bleak Midlands council estate. Townsend turns their struggle with benefits forms, cramped kitchens and suspicious neighbours into pointed, humane political comedy.

Adrian's diaries in his early twenties trace a restless period of bedsits, dead-end jobs and doomed love affairs. Convinced he is a serious writer, he bounces between Oxford and London while friends move ahead, capturing the aimless, hopeful drift of post-student life.

A middle-aged man discovers a bag of aborted fetuses dumped in a ditch, jolting him back to the abortion that ended his relationship with Angela years before. Their uneasy reunion, and encounters with a damaged young couple, explore grief, guilt and the longing to parent.

Adrian, now thirty, works as head chef in a fashionable Soho restaurant as the 1997 election approaches. While Pandora runs for Parliament and his family members drift in and out of chaos, he attempts to juggle fatherhood, debt and sudden media attention with his usual misplaced dignity.

These recovered diaries find Adrian at the turn of the millennium, a single father of two boys, living back in the Midlands and ricocheting between temporary jobs, disastrous romances and family entanglements as small domestic dramas brush against early War on Terror headlines.

Collected from a long-running magazine column, these short pieces follow Susan Townsend through everyday middle-aged life, from holidays and supermarkets to writer's block and health scares, with a wry eye for social absurdities and the small things that quietly matter.

Prime Minister Edward Clare, panicking that he has lost touch with real voters, sneaks out of Downing Street in disguise with his bodyguard Jack Sprat. Their secret tour of Britain becomes a comic road trip through disillusioned towns, baffled officials and awkward homecomings.

Adrian is in his early thirties, deep in debt, dithering between two women and trying to be a good father when his son joins the army. As the Iraq War looms, his muddled politics and personal crises collide in painfully funny diary entries.

Short and sharp, this book returns to the world of The Queen and I, following the former Queen as she and her family adjust to life in Hell Close, a scruffy council street where broken appliances, nosy neighbours and tight budgets replace palace routines.

Set more than a decade after the monarchy is abolished, Queen Elizabeth, Charles and Camilla are still exiled on a private, fenced-off estate ruled by a petty tycoon. Political tides turn, and Townsend uses the chaos to lampoon celebrity culture, populism and royal mythmaking.

Now in late middle age, Adrian juggles a failing marriage, money worries and a frightening prostate diagnosis while trying to stay upbeat for his children. His diary charts hospital appointments, family rows and small joys with the same anxious, skewed wit as ever.

On the day her gifted twins leave for university, exhausted mother Eva climbs into bed and refuses to get out. As her husband, children and assorted strangers circle the house, her quiet protest exposes years of neglect, secrets and muddled loyalties.

Written as the secret diary of a fiercely ambitious grocer's daughter in 1930s Grantham, this novella imagines teenage Margaret Hilda Roberts before she becomes Margaret Thatcher, skewering ideas about class, thrift and destiny through her priggish, oddly endearing voice.

Presented as Adrian's own verse, this slim collection gathers poems from across his life, from earnest teenage pieces to late musings on politics, masculinity and dwindling desire, offering a sideways, self-important echo of the events in the main diaries.