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Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years
Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years
Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years
Audiobook9 hours

Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years

Written by Sue Townsend

Narrated by Mark Hadfield

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

()

About this audiobook

Adrian Mole is 39 and a quarter. Due to his financial situation he has been forced to move next door to his parents. And his numerous nightly visits to the lavatory lead him to suspect prostate trouble. As his worries multiply, a phone call to his old flame ignites powerful memories and makes him wonder - is she the only one who can save him now?
LanguageEnglish
Release dateMar 1, 2010
ISBN9781407454672
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.  

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Reviews for Adrian Mole

Rating: 3.8453237561151083 out of 5 stars
4/5

139 ratings12 reviews

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Painful, funny, wise, and unbelievably thick, Adrian Mole lives on...and he's almost caught up to my age. Not sure how to feel about that. But, no doubt, I'll read the next installment.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Fantastic narration of this truly funny book. Don’t waste your time with rip-offs involving Chardonnay-drinking female protagonists: Adrian Mole is the original and by far the best comedy diarist.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A bitter sweet end to the Mole diaries. I've listened to them all back to back. They're especially poignant for me as my age mirrors Adrian's and I sympathise with his lot. As funny and sad as the rest of the series. All the usual characters are here. The fact that the author has passed away means we leave Adrian frozen in time in somewhat dire straits. For once I hope Sue's family and publishers agree to find a ghost writer to try and continue the stories.

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The final book in the Adrian Mole series, and this ones a classic. Adrian continues his life as a bad husband, inattentive parent, and general useless lump, only this time he maybe gets a happy ending. Or maybe he doesn't, its unclear. Things that I notice on the second reading that I missed the first time round: The "prostrate" joke in the title works in multiple ways - firstly, because throughout the book Adrian is enraged at people confusing the words prostrate and prostate. Secondly, because in this book Adrian is defeated by life. Unlike earlier books he is no longer really an agent of his own misfortune; instead he is flotsam, unable to even to make the decisions necessary to screw up his own life. Even with Pandora throwing herself at him he is not able to act. He is basically face down in the mud and drowning. Secondly, the ending is so wonderfully ambiguous. There's a mess of good luck and bad luck that reflects real life. As our last ever visit to Adrian its brutal but in this its just right,Yes, this is a fine book and a great finale to the series. Its a damn tragedy that we'll never get to see any more of the Mole family.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Sue Townsend had more than enough direct personal experience of serious illness and its treatment in the last years of her life, and she puts that to good use here, in an uncharacteristically dark episode. Adrian's idyllic family life in a Leicestershire village is threatened by the usual external things — the pub, church and post-office all seem to be in danger — whilst his marriage, his job and his health are all under attack too. And the economy is falling apart, whilst his mother has somehow been persuaded to appear on Jerry Springer. This is probably the least obviously funny part of the cycle, but it does have its fair share of comic moments, and Townsend treats the emotionally difficult subject-matter with lightness and sensitivity.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Adrian is now approaching 40, his son Glenn is in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban, Adrian is having problems with his prostate and his marriage to Daisy is falling apart.Adrian is living in a concerted pigsty and working at a bookshop.Mr Carlton-Hughes who owns the bookshop is ill. He lives with his friend Leslie but Adrian doesn’t know whether Leslie is a man or a woman.Adrian’s little daughter Gracie is quite the dictator and wins every argument against him.He is still an incessant letter-writer. He writes to a man who has attained the advanced age of 109 pestering him about how he has kept his hair. (Apparently Adrian has not.)He has written a play, Plague!, set in the medieval countryside and has given lines to over 60 people.He informs us that he is 20 per cent agnostic and 80 per cent atheist, but still feels guilty about not going to church.Tony Blair has finally resigned as leader of the Labour party and will be standing down as P.M. (So apropos these present days when Theresa May has done the same vis-á-vis the Conservative party.)Gordon Brown is the new PM and Adrian immediately commences to write to him and ask him to look into his tax affairs.Daisy now weighs thirteen stone twelve ounces, which would be great if she were a light-heavyweight boxer.It is raining incessantly. On Sunday 1st July smoking in a public place or place of work is forbidden. “Though if you are a lunatic, a prisoner, an MP or a member of the Royal Family you are exempt.”Re MPs being exempt, ha, ha! – no surprise there – they exempt themselves from everything!Adrian’s parents are smoking fanatics.One of the boys at Gracie’s nursery school has a packed lunch of “two bags of crisps, a bottle of Coke, a bag of Haribo sweets, and a cheese string”. This is no doubt taken from real life.Daisy meets Hugo-Fairfax-Lycett, soon to be her lover.Adrian’s blind friend falls in love with another blind man much to Adrian’s perturbation.There are many storylines in the book but the main one is Adrian’s bladder/prostate problem. The title of the book “The prostrate years” is a pun referring to the fact that most of Adrian’s uninformed family and friends refer to his sickly gland as his “prostrate” when in fact the correct word is “prostate”, and Adrian on account of his problem is “completely overcome with distress and exhaustion” (definition of “prostrate” in the Oxford English Dictionary).It turns out that Adrian has cancer so his life revolves around his visits to the hospital for chemo treatments.I understand from the dedications at the beginning of the book that Sue Townsend herself had health problems while writing the book (and in general I know had severe health problems).One thing is certain in my view – one of Sue Townsend’s main achievements was transforming the negative into the positive, and despite her poor health and suffering became one of the funniest writers in Britain, brightening up the lives of her readers by her humorous books, not least the Adrian Mole diaries.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    It's difficult to say good bye to the character and writer that you loved. It's not as perfect as other novels from Adrian Mole's series but still very good. It's much darker, probably corresponding to Sue Townsend own deteriorating health. It is left the Adrian Mole story unfinished. Sad.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    In which Adrian Mole hits 40, having lost his wife and daughter and job, his only gain being... prostate cancer. Doesn't sound like the funniest novel in the world, but Ms Townsend pulls it off. She balances the tragicomedy with poignancy, spot-on satire about real world events (the smoking ban, the financial crash) and a real love of her characters. I'm still reeling in admiration as to how she managed to get the tone so pitch-perfect. She's up there with Alan Bennett and John Mortimer in the British comic writer stakes, and is better than ever. The original teenage Mole diaries were the biggest selling novels of the 80s, but this is actually superior in every sense - laughs, tears, suspense, satire, & up-to-date research on the dreaded process of cancer treatment. Deserves more sales. Can't recommend it enough.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Absolutely classic Adrian Mole. I think I have read all the books and also recall the ITV series back in the 1980s or 90s. I love Adrian, he's such a great character and reading his diaries you really find yourself believing in him. Reading this brought back a lot of memories for me of his previous history and other characters - some I'd forgotten about (Bert Baxter for example). I don't think Adrian will ever find total happiness, there's always something in the background that will ruin things for him, but that's life. This was a great, fun read and I hope there's many more to come.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Reading this was very much like meeting up with an old friend. Adrian is forty and has been diagnosed with prostate cancer. He tells his story against the backdrop of the beginning of the global recession, we follow his parents off to Northern Rock to retrieve their savings which are subsequently stashed in a fake baked bean tin in Adrian's kitchen and see his poisonous half brother Brett lose a fortune in the property bubble. Not laugh out loud funny this time but very poignant and heart warming nonetheless.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Adrian is now 39, working in a bookstore, living in a converted pigsty with his second wife and their little girl, suffering from prostate trouble and as much of a loser as ever. The large cast of characters include the usual from the previous books (Pandora, Nigel) as well as some new ones. Adrian's son William is curiously almost entirely absent; he is mentioned in I think only one sentence. I understand the boy is living in Nigeria but I thought it was a bit odd that he and his father didn't at least email or call each other once in awhile.There's the usual stuff about the stupid government and topical problems with the economic collapse, and as usual Adrian does a lot of whining. Longtime fans of the Adrian Mole diaries will find this book worthy of a read, but I doubt a neophyte could get into it.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Adrain Mole is back. He's older (almost 40), but not much wiser & still fumbling along trying to deal with his dysfunctional parents, his children by his various wives and his current wife, Daisy who is not too happy to have been moved from her life in London to a converted pigstye in Mangold Parva near Leicester.Sue Townsend clearly has a deep affection for Adrian. Even at his most aggravating, his kind heart shows through. His character is summed up by his employer, Mr. Carlton-Hayes (typically for Adrian after the bookstore where Adrian was employed has closed due to lack of business) as "possibly the kindest person it has been my priviledge to meet."Other volumes in this series have been funnier & have plots that propel the story in a more effective manner. But at the end of the current installment, we see Adrian facing life with a better outlook & more contentment than he has had in years, and, dare we say it, perhaps a hope of finally winning Pandora's heart?