Adrian Mole

Are American fans of the fictional diarist Bridget Jones aware of her literary ancestor, Adrian Mole? They might like to meet him! Adrian's first diary came out in 1982, when he was entering his angst-ridden teen years as a middle-class Brit. This volume finds Adrian a cook (specialty: offal!) and a single father, suffering writer's block, and still pining for the heartless Pandora. The crises are suitably ridiculous, the social satire inimitable. Daintry has an attractive voice, and his reading captures Adrian's befuddlement, anguish, and self-delusion with precision, although the long pauses between sentences often disrupt the flow. Like many sequels, THE CAPUCCINO YEARS is even funnier for those who have read earlier Mole diaries. S.P. (c) AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine

Mark Hadfield sounds exactly as fans would expect Adrian Mole to sound--always admirable, somewhat befuddled, often amused, and frequently amazed. Adrian's still writing letters to Gordon Brown and Trevor Nunn, his second wife hates living in the Piggery, and he's still in love with Pandora Braithwaite, a junior minister in the Foreign Office. In this episode we follow Adrian through his diagnosis ("No, it won't be my prostate. I'm only thirty-nine-and-a-half!") and treatment for prostate cancer, from radiation through chemo. Hadfield keeps Adrian real, stunned by the dismal truth, yet never self-pitying. The combination of Hadfield's understated reading and Townsend's unsentimental story offers a listening experience that deals head-on with a life-shattering event and finds resilience and humor in the human condition. S.J.H. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine