Bridget Jones: The edge of reason - Helen Fielding

'There's only one explanation,' Jude was declaring. 'Mark Darcy's gay.'

'Of course he's gay,' snarled Shazzer, pouring out more Bloody Marys.

'Do you really think so?' I said, excited by the bizarre yet ego-comforting theory.

'Why else would he go off with someone freakishly tall, with no sense of girlfriend-hood and no bottom: i.e. a virtual man?'

The Wilderness Years are over! But not for long. At the end of Bridget Jones's Diary, Bridget hiccuped off into the sunset with man-of-her-dreams Mark Darcy. Now, in The Edge of Reason, she discovers what it is like when you have the man of your dreams actually in your flat and he hasn't done the washing up, not just the whole of this week, but ever.

Lurching through a morass of self-help book theories and mad advice from Jude and Shazzer, struggling with a boyfriend-stealing-ex-friend with thighs like a baby giraffe, an 8ft hole in the living-room wall, a mother obsessed with boiled-egg peelers, and a builder obsessed with large reservoir fish, Bridget embarks on a spiritual epiphany, which takes her from the cappuccino queues of Notting Hill to the palm and the magic mushroom-kissed shores of...

Bridge is back. V.G.