Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction

“Townsend’s wickedly funny novels are another reason to be grateful for the right of free speech.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Townsend is [a] comic genius.”—The Village Voice (a Top Shelf selection) “The latest careening satire to emerge from Sue Townsend’s wickedly literary rocket launcher, combining love, politics and credit-card debacle into a not-to-be-missed novel.”—The Seattle Times “Complex, funny and wrenching.”—Publishers Weekly Adrian Mole, now age thirty-four and three quarters, needs proof that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction so he can get a refund from a travel agency of the deposit he paid on a trip to Cyprus. Naturally, he writes to Tony Blair for some evidence. He’s engaged to Marigold, but obsessed with her voluptuous sister. And he is so deeply in debt to banks and credit card companies that it would take more than twice his monthly salary to ever repay them. He needs a guest speaker for his creative writing group’s dinner in Leicestershire and wonders if the prime minister’s wife is available. In short, Adrian is back in true form, unable—like so many people we know, but of course, not us—to admit that the world does not revolve around him. But recognizing the universal core of Adrian’s dilemmas is what makes them so agonizingly funny.