New Ladybird for Grown-Ups: 'The Mum'

Penguin Random House is to bring out the latest in its Ladybird Books for Grown-Ups series, How it Works: The Mum.

Pitched as "the perfect gift for Mother's Day" and "so simple even a teenager could get it", the book is published on 11th February, priced £6.99.

It joins the hit series that has sold over 1.3 million copies for £7.82m (across all eight titles) to date through Nielsen BookScan's Total Consumer Market. How it Works: The Husband (Michael Joseph) became the Official Christmas number one.

How it Works: The Mum features original Ladybird art and brand new text, "specially planned to help Mums deal with the world about them, and to help those dealing with Mums understand the way they operate".

Other books in the series are The Ladybird Book of Mindfulness; The Ladybird Book of Dating; The Ladybird Book of The Shed; The Ladybird Book of The Hipster; The Ladybird Book of The Hangover; The Ladybird Book of The Mid-life Crisis; How it Works: The Husband; and How it Works: The Wife.

The series' authors are Jason Hazeley and Joel Morris, co-writers of The Framley Examiner (Michael Joseph, 2002) and Bollocks to Alton Towers (Penguin, 2006). They have written for radio and TV comedy shows including Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe, Miranda, That Mitchell and Webb Look, The Armstrong and Miller Show, as well as Paddington, the film.

The authors said they feel "enormously privileged to have been allowed inside Ladybird towers to muck about with a genuine national treasure"; Hazeley and Morris first published spoof Ladybirds back in 2003 in their book Historic Framley (Michael Joseph).

2015 marked the centenary of Ladybird, which has been publishing books for children since 1915. The original 4.5 x 7” hardback books were sold at 2/6d for almost 30 years to become "a nostalgic style icon" today.