True Confessions of Adrian Albert Mole, The Adrian Mole Series

As his secret diary extends into his later teen years, the angsty Brit remains “part Holden Caulfield, part . . . Bertie Wooster” and all Adrian (The New York Times).

Send my diaries back. I would hate them to fall into unfriendly, possibly commercial hands. I am afraid of blackmail; as you know my diaries are full of sex and scandal.

What’s happening to Adrian Mole? He’s on the cusp of adulthood and burgeoning success as a published poet. But . . . he still lives at home, refuses to part with his threadbare stuffed rabbit, and has lost his job at the library for a shocking act of impudence: He shelved Jane Austen under “light romance.” Even worse, someone named Sue Townsend stole his diaries and published them under her own name. Of course they were bestsellers.

The “brilliant comic creation” returns, sharing his poetry (award-winning!), travel journals (he’s going places), musings on lost love (more of an obsession), and some major news (he’s writing a novel!) (The Times). But not all the confessions are his alone. We also hear from that notorious pilferer Townsend, who, after receiving a suspended prison sentence, now lives in shame in a bleak moorland cottage. Don’t tell Adrian, but the New York Times Book Review still insists that it’s she who “is a national treasure.”

From “one of Britain’s most celebrated comic writers” (The Guardian) comes the inventive new novel in the “perceptive and funny” (The New York Times) series that has sold more than twenty million copies worldwide, was adapted for television and staged as a musical, and is nothing less than “a phenomenon” (The Washington Post).