Adrian Mole faces the same agonies that life sets before most adolescents: trouble s with girls, school, parents, and an uncaring world. The difference, though, between young Master Mole and his peers is that this British lad keeps a diary—an earnest chronicle of longing and disaster that has charmed more than five million readers since its two-volume initial publication. From teenaged Adrian’s anguished adoration of a lovely, mercurial schoolmate to his view of his parents’ constantly creaking relationship to his heartfelt but hilarious attempts at cathartic verse, here is an outrageous triumph of deadpan—and deadly accurate—satire. ABBA, Princess Di’s wedding, street punks, Monty Python, the Falklands campaign . . . all the cultural pageantry of a keenly observed era marches past the unique perspective of Sue Townsend’s brilliant comic creation: A . Mole, the unforgettable lad whose self-absorption only gets funnier as his life becomes more desperate.