Missing Mole

It is thirty years since Adrian Mole first hit our shelves. To celebrate, Penguin has re-released the oeuvre with shiny new covers and a celeb introduction from David Walliams for the first of the bunch, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 ¾. But that’s not all. Joining the commemorative volumes is a new Sue Townsend novel, not part of the Mole canon though burdened with a typically gangly title: The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year.
 
It starts with the sort of classic Townsend what-if scenario deployed so brilliantly in two of her other non-Mole books, The Queen and I and Queen Camilla. Then it was royalty on a council estate; here stressed middle-aged mother of two, Eva Beaver, crumbles under the pressures of suburbia and decides to take refuge beneath the sheets. Having packed her twins off to university, Eva undergoes a wonderfully polite breakdown.