Secret diary & growing pains of adrian mole aged 13 3/4 (Penguin Books)

Celebrate Adrian Mole's 50th Birthday with this new double edition, featuring the first two books in the hilarious collection and see life through the spectacles of a misunderstood boy growing up in the early 1980s. 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. Telling us candidly about his parents' marital troubles, The Dog, his life as a tortured poet and 'misunderstood intellectual', his love for the divine Pandora and his horror at learning of his mother's pregnancy, Adrian's painfully honest diary is a hilarious and heartfelt bronicle of misspent adolescence. Features the complete texts of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4 and The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole.'I've never experienced a greater sense of recognition than when reading The Secret Diary' David Nicholls 'I not only wept, I howled and hooted and had to get up and walk around the room and wipe my eyes so that I could go on reading' Tom Sharpe 'Every sentence is witty and well thought out, and the whole has reverberations beyond itself' The Times 'Townsend has held a mirror up to the nation and made us happy to laugh at what we see in it' Sunday Telegraph 'One of the great comic creations' Daily Mirror 'The funniest person in the world' Caitlin Moran