On the face of it – this is a quick, easy, amusing, light read – although there is certainly food for thought for those who wish to find it. Award-winning novelist Hayley Long revels in the latest offering from national treasure Sue Townsend, The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year. Instead, the tongue in cheek writing, bedecked with racial and sexist stereotypes and a plethora of plot-holes, loses its edge the more you read. Adrian Mole may have been a bestseller, but this book probably wouldn’t have ever been published if it wasn’t for Townsend’s previous success.

On the other hand, if Ms Townsend had stripped out some then I'd probably be complaining that the ending was rushed. Fortunately the fact that Townsend is a gifted and able satirist saved the first half of the book somewhat and, as an ever-curious reader, I quite enjoyed seeing where it would all pan out around the theme of escape. Townsend also wrote the screenplays for television adaptations of the first and second books and Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years (published 1998, BBC television adaptation 2001).

The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Yearis a funny and touching novel about what happens when someone stops being the person everyone wants them to be. If the planets turned on their orbits, she would not have known and would not care, while her husband entertained himself in his man cave out in the back yard shack, watching those planets and stars through his telescope, hoping to have one named after him, the astronomer, Dr. I am begrudgingly giving this book one star out of five, simply as I managed to drag myself through 346 long pages and not reach the end, thus the one star is a feeble thought that in the last hundred or so pages it might have gotten better. Irritatingly, Kelby has a tendency to state the obvious – the Titanic's voyage is described as "momentous yet ultimately unfortunate" – and though this is a vivid and detailed reconstruction of a bygone era, on the whole it's a pretty hammy performance.

As the book went on, I became angry with the main character, because she was so totally unrealistic. We mightn't, for example, consider that our self-imposed withdrawal from the world also included trips to the bathroom, leaving us in the delicate position of imploring friends and family to dispose of our bodily waste in giant freezer bags. I kind of had in mind "The woman who walked into doors" or a "Rachael's holiday" - a story to unfold.Or, it's a serious and thought provoking book, or at least, an attempt at one, with nothing much going on under the surface. The characters are (with one exception) selfish, narcissist, feckless idiots with no regard for anyone else. 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 always found time to read widely.

Written by Sue Townsend, the bestselling author of the Adrian Mole series, my expectations were high for The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year.It feels like Townsend’s editor tapped her on the shoulder and told her she had 20 pages left and could she hurry it up a bit.