Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years - Tapa dura

End of Century Mole. An accidental celebrity, with a spreading bald patch, despairing of family values, Mole is still worrying: Will the Dome be finished on time? Is Viagra cheating? Why won't BBC1 produce The White Van, his serial killer comedy? Will Pandora Braithwaite MP become Blair's favourite babe? Will Pauline Mole throw caution to the winds with a pre-millennium fling? Will George Mole regain his erectile function? And will Adrian himself find the fulfilment he seeks as celebrity offal chef, single parent, and celibate novelist? Mole, aged 30 1/4, chronicles the closing years of the century with slanderous abandon.

Sue Townsend was born in Leicester in 1946. Despite not learning to read until the age of eight, leaving school at fifteen with no qualifications and having three children by the time she was in her mid-twenties, she always found time to read widely. She also wrote secretly for twenty years. After joining a writers' group at The Phoenix Theatre, Leicester, she won a Thames Television award for her first play, Womberang, and became a professional playwright and novelist. After the publication of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾, Sue continued to make the nation laugh and prick its conscience. She wrote seven further volumes of Adrian's diaries and five other popular novels - including The Queen and I, Number Ten and The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year - and numerous well received plays. Sue passed away in 2014 at the age of sixty-eight. She remains widely regarded as Britain's favourite comic writer.