Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years
    Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years
    Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years
    Audiobook5 hours

    Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years

    Written by Sue Townsend

    Narrated by Nicholas Barnes

    3.5/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    Finally given the heave-ho by Pandora, Adrian Mole finds himself in the situation of living with the love-of-his-life as she goes about shacking up with other men. Worse, as he slides down the employment ladder, from deskbound civil servant in Oxford to part-time washer-upper in Soho, he finds that critical reception for his epic novel, Lo! The Flat Hills of My Homeland, is not quite as he might have hoped.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherW. F. Howes Ltd
    Release dateJun 4, 2015
    ISBN9781471293665
    Author

    Sue Townsend

    Sue Townsend was born in Leicester, England, in 1946. Despite not learning to read until the age of eight, leaving school at fifteen with no qualifications, and having three children by the time she was in her mid-twenties, she managed to be very well read. Townsend wrote secretly for twenty years, and after joining a writers’ group at the Phoenix Theatre, Leicester, she won a Thames Television Award for her first play, Womberang, and became a professional playwright and novelist. Following the publication of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾, she continued to make the nation laugh and prick its conscience with seven more volumes of Adrian’s diaries, five popular novels—including The Queen and I, Number Ten, and The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year—and numerous well-received plays. Townsend passed away in 2014 at the age of sixty-eight, and remains widely regarded as Britain’s favorite comic writer.  

    More audiobooks from Sue Townsend

    Related to Adrian Mole

    Titles in the series (7)

    View More
    View More

    Related audiobooks

    Humor & Satire For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Four Of A Kind

      May 3, 2023

      Four Of A Kind
      4 min read

    • Article

      Pats On The Back

      Dec 12, 2019

      I AM writing this column from a prone position. Reclining on my sofa in the library, propped up with cushions like some latter-day Lady Ottoline Morrell, but without the wit, brilliance and patronage. I wish I could say my current condition arose fro

      3 min read

    • Article

      Life In The past Lane

      Aug 27, 2021

      Life In The past Lane
      5 min read

    • Article

      Summer Reading Guide

      Jan 2, 2022

      Summer Reading Guide
      6 min read

    • Article

      A Pub At Woodstock

      Dec 23, 2021

      A Pub At Woodstock
      8 min read

    • Article

      Rag Doll

      May 3, 2018

      Rag Doll
      11 min read

    • Article

      I Met Fear on the Hill

      Dec 15, 2018

      It’s the summer of 1966, and Sheila and Peter are a young married couple living in Berkeley. They are very much in love, and also very high—tripping on acid for the first time in their lives, in Tilden Park—walking in a shallow stream full of primord

      32 min read

    • Article

      15 Of My Favourite Things!

      May 3, 2022

      15 Of My Favourite Things!
      3 min read

    • Article

      Ghost Girl, Banana

      Aug 21, 2023

      By the time I was 25, there were only two things I remembered about Mumma. The first was that she smelled of watermelons, the second was that we were happy. We’d taken our father’s name of course, but a name is only half a story. The other half exist

      6 min read

    • Article

      Last Orders

      Jul 28, 2021

      Last Orders
      5 min read

    • Article

      Anything Goes For Me And My Chums

      Aug 25, 2021

      In my neck of the woods, it’s back to normal. How’s it with you? On the bus and the London Underground, I am still wearing a mask, but other than that, everything is much as it was before the pandemic struck – except that my office-worker friends rea

      3 min read

    • Article

      Nothing Compares To You, Mum

      Aug 23, 2023

      Is there a more comical phrase, from the mouth of someone pushing 60, than ‘I'm an orphan now'? There may be rivals. ‘Suella Braverman,’ for example, ‘she's nice.’ Or ‘I love flying Ryanair.’ For all that, there is something so innately amusing about

      3 min read

    • Article

      Summer Beach Reads

      Jan 10, 2021

      Summer Beach Reads
      7 min read

    • Article

      Mysterious Moments

      Mar 22, 2019

      A few years ago, my husband and I had to go out of town for a funeral. We’d be gone for a night and into the next day, so we arranged for our neighbor Belinda to come by to feed our cat, Sweetpea, in the morning. When we returned home from our travel

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Last Waylon Party

      Jan 18, 2019

      The Last Waylon Party
      14 min read

    • Article

      A Southern Christmas

      Nov 1, 2023

      A Southern Christmas
      7 min read

    • Article

      A Life Not Forgotten

      Feb 2, 2023

      A Life Not Forgotten
      6 min read

    • Article

      My Story The Secrets We Keep

      Oct 7, 2020

      My Story The Secrets We Keep
      4 min read

    • Article

      When I Say Goodbye

      May 31, 2018

      When I Say Goodbye
      16 min read

    • Article

      One Carrot

      Jul 2, 2020

      One Carrot
      5 min read

    • Article

      Every CLOUD

      Aug 31, 2022

      Every CLOUD
      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Adrian Mole

    3.5/5

    192 ratings7 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      Always a good time...on to the Capuccino Years!
    • 3/5
      Back to diary format, opening with Adrian lodged in Pandora's box-room in Oxford and working — on the strength of his non-existent biology "A"-level — on the newt desk at the Environment Department. The story takes us on to a Soho restaurant and to Adrian's epiphany at a writers' workshop on Naxos, with some nice comic scenes along the way, but there's always a sense here that Townsend hasn't really got a feel for the adult Adrian yet, and she makes him unnecessarily autistic to force comedy out where it doesn't belong.
    • 4/5
      This diary recounts further hilarious episodes from the life of Adrian Mole. He is now nearly 24 years of age.The first entry is from January 1st, 1991 when Adrian has a throbbing head owing to being “forced” to drink excessive amounts of alcohol at his mother’s party the night before. (He obviously is unable to say “no”.)Sue Townsend describes not only Adrian’s life but the lives of the whole host of characters in his life.Adrian’s life is dictated by these other people. He is still in love with Pandora, now married to a bisexual semi-aristocrat who wears a monocle, and with a lover called Professor Jack Cavendish (it is Pandora who has the lover, not her husband, though I’m sure he has many too).: he still looks after the centenarian. Bert Baxter, buys his “vile” cigarettes and cuts his “horrible” toenails.Adrian has an 8-year-old sister, Rosie.His first love is now Dr Pandora Braithwaite, fluent in Russian, Serbo-Croat and “various other little-used languages” (Though I wouldn’t say Russian is little-used.) She looks more like a supermodel than a Doctor of Philosophy.At present Adrian is living in Pandora’s box room in Oxford, still hoping to marry her one day, and still hoping to become a famous author.He is working at the Department of the Environment charged with protecting colonies of newts, paid to champion their rights but privately sick of them.Adrian is trying to find a girl-friend by a series of blind dates, who either don’t turn up or who leave in a hurry with some lame excuse or other.He is normal-looking, clean and pleasant, yet can’t get a young woman into his bed.Adrian’s father had an illegitimate son, Brett, born to his lover, termed Stick Insect by Adrian. His mother had a short affair with the neighbour, Mr Lucas. He himself had an affair with an illiterate woman called Sharon Bott but deserted her when she announced she was pregnant. (Prepare for a series of DNA tests subsequent to these infidelities/affairs.)Adrian despises himself – he feels he is a loathsome person.He spends much time penning poems, included in his diary for our edification, and has begun to write an experimental novel, originally written with consonants only.Feeling that Adrian is in dire need of psychological help, Pandora makes an appointment for him to see her friend, Leonora De Witt, who is a psychotherapist.Britain is at war with Iraq, and Adrian hires a portable colour TV so he can watch it in bed.Adrian’s old class-mate, Barry Kent, who bullied him at school, is becoming a famous writer – one of the characters in his book, Dork’s Diary, is coincidentally called Aiden Vole and is an “outrageous caricature” of Adrian – he “is obsessed with matters anal. He is jingoistic, deeply conservative and a failure with women.”Sue Townsend is one of my absolute favourite authors. The Adrian diaries reflect and parody life in Britain in the years in question.In my view, and everybody else’s too, I’m sure, Sue Townsend is immensely gifted, and her books are some of the funniest in print. She has a talent for finding the humorous sides of all the negative aspects of life.I highly recommend that you read this volume too.
    • 4/5
      The fourth installment of diary entries of Adrian Mole, now an adult still in love with Pandora (although it is no longer mutual) and still misunderstanding most of the events in his life. Adrian might not be a teenager anymore, but he is still wonderfully naive and entertaining. The satire in Townsend's books works because Adrian is so very sincere about everything he believes, although some of his ideas and views are so very ludicrous; he manages to be endearing even when he goes completely bonkers. The audiobook narrator, Nicholas Barnes, does a really great job with Adrian's voice.
    • 4/5
      As an artist who must go where my pen leads me, I obviously identify with Mr Adrian Mole. Sue Townsend (RIP) manages to get into the mindset of a young, gormless man and takes us along for the ride."The Wilderness Years" sees Adrian mong along life's railroad, watching as others in his vicinity make it big, such as Pandora and Barry Kent. There are also other women in his life like Bianca and Jo Jo, and thus more opportunity for Adrian to prove he is as clueless about women as the rest of us.I stopped reading Adrian Mole not long after this edition but don't let that hold you back from the wilderness.
    • 3/5
      Adrian Mole, erstwhile novelist and self-styled intellectual, returns for a fourth installment of his diaries. While the first 3/4 of this book was more or less filled with the same whining naivety of the preceeding volume of this series, I was pleased with the final quarter in which Adrian seems to finally be growing up. Not a moment too soon. I am now vindicated in having purchased the entire series and am looking forward to the next volume.
    • 5/5
      sue townsends alter ego, adrian as a young adult absolute scream