Adrian Albert Mole is the fictional protagonist in a series of books by English author Sue Townsend.
The first two books appealed to many readers as a realistic and humorous treatment of the inner life of an adolescent boy, and capturing the zeitgeist of the UK during the Thatcher period.
The first books concentrate on Adrian's desires and ambitions in life (to marry his teenage sweetheart, publish his poetry and novels, obtain financial security) and his complete failure to achieve them.
In dealing with political events, a constant plot device is that Adrian makes confident predictions and statements that are known to be wrong by the reader, ranging from belief in the Hitler Diaries to an Iraqi victory in the Gulf War and the existence of their weapons of mass destruction.
Though not especially popular he has a small circle of friends and even a girlfriend Pandora Braithwaite (whose parents Ivan and Tania are affluent Trotskyites).
At one point he falls into bad company with Barry Kent and his gang, who had bullied him in earlier years, but generally he keeps out of trouble.
[1] Ironically Adrian actually is a good writer, as the quality of his diaries attests, but he feels he must adopt a "high" or avant-garde literary style to be taken seriously.
The Flat Hills of My Homeland is unsurprisingly never published: the few passages included in the diaries are painful to read (though Adrian himself regards them as "magnificent"), and the first few drafts were even written without vowels.
Over several books he develops a script for a white van serial killer comedy programme which the BBC is reluctant to produce.
Having lived in relative poverty for much of his life, and for some time in London in actual squalor, he overextends himself financially, lured by the banks' promises of easy credit, and buys a converted loft apartment, at Rat Wharf.
Adrian's parents Pauline and George Mole are working-class characters with limited social mobility who drink and smoke heavily.
In a reversal of a typical teenager-mother relationship, Pauline berates Adrian for keeping his room "like a bloody shrine".
Adrian's paternal grandmother Edna May Mole is also prominent in the early diaries until her death in The Wilderness Years.
George fathers a second son, Brett, by a lover, Doreen Slater, whom Adrian privately refers to as "Stick Insect".
However, in The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole, it is stated that his name was Arnold, and as Arthur in Weapons of Mass Destruction.
However, in an interview on Leicester hospital station Radio Fox on 5 June 2008, Townsend said that she was in fact writing a new Mole book entitled The Prostrate Years, which was released in 2009.
In October 2009 the Leicester Mercury featured an interview with Townsend where she discussed the new Mole book and her plans for future works.
[2] In 2011, Townsend published a short Adrian Mole piece that tied into the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.
In a 2013 interview, Townsend discussed her intention to wrap up the series in two further volumes, but acknowledged her declining health might make this plan impossible.
Private Eye parodied the books with their The Secret Diary of John Major, age 47¾, in which Major was portrayed as naïve and childish, keeping lists of his enemies in a Rymans Notebook called his "Bastards Book", and featuring "my wife Norman" and "Mr Dr Mawhinney" as recurring characters.