Adrian mole: the cappuccino years, paperback/sue townsend

30TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION With the Mole books, Townsend has an unrivalled claim to be this countrys foremost practising comic novelist Mail on Sunday Wednesday August 13th Here I am again - in my old bedroom.

Older, wiser, but with less hair, unfortunately.

The atmosphere in this house is very bad.

The dog looks permanently exhausted.

Every time the phone rings my mother snatches it up as though a kidnapper were on the line.

Adrian Mole is thirty, single and a father.

His cooking at a top London restaurant has been equally mocked (the sausage on my plate could have been a turd - AA Gill) and celebrated (will he be the nations first celebrity offal chef?).

And the love of his life, Pandora Braithwaite, is the newly elected MP for Ashby-de-la-Zouch - one of Blairs Babes.

He is frustrated, disappointed and undersexed.

But a letter from Adrians past is about to change everything .

Adrian Mole really is a brilliant comic creation.

Every sentence is witty and well thought out, and the whole has reverberations beyond itself The Times One of the greatest comic creations.

I cant remember a more relentlessly funny book Daily Mirror.