New Bridget Jones novel title and excerpt released – and she’s on Twitter!

Author Helen Fielding has fulfilled many a singleton's dream by announcing the title of the third Bridget Jones novel – Mad about the Boy, the follow-up to Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. Happily, it will still be in diary form. And apparently our Bridget is dating again… and has turned to social media as a tool for finding men. Good grief. Are those oversize knickers too tight or something?

When asked which boy Bridget is mad about, Fielding is said to have simply raised an eyebrow. The plot is, of course, being kept under tight wraps, but publisher Jonathan Cape says that, while continuing to keep a diary, Bridget is “immersed in texting and experimenting with social media”. That can’t be good. Hasn’t anyone warned Bridget of the perils of taking to Twitter after a few vodkas?

No, apparently not. Judging by this excerpt from book, Bridget still has some lessons to learn when it comes to dating and modern technology...

Wednesday 24 October 2012

11.27 p.m Just presss d SEND. Iss fineisn’t it?

You see, this is the trouble with the modern world. If it was the days of letter-writing, I would never even have started to find his address, a pen, a piece of paper, an envelope, a stamp, and gone outside at 11.30p.m. to find a postbox. A text is gone at the brush of a fingertip, like a nuclear bomb or exocet missile.

DATING RULE NO: 1

DO NOT TEXT WHEN DRUNK.

But what of Mark Darcy and Daniel Cleaver, we hear you cry? Fielding has confirmed they will be a “presence”. The, ahem, two loves of her life a mere presence? How earth shattering. We were expecting Bridget and Mark to be nestled around a roaring fire still arguing about whether their kids should go to Eton. Perhaps Mark’s ironing of his pants got too much, perhaps he was sent to work abroad, or perhaps Bridget has got those oversize knickers in a knot about something silly again (far more likely).

It’s been a whopping fourteen years since Fielding published Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. In December Fielding told Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour: “I found last Spring I had new stuff I wanted to say. Things that didn’t exist when I last wrote, like emails and texting. The way life is lived through Twitter. And a whole new idea for a phase of her life that I can’t jinx by describing it.”

Working Title films is also said to have confirmed work has begun on a third film, entitled Bridget Jones’s Baby. Indeed, Tim Bevan, co-chairman of the production company, told the BBC: “Bridget Jones’s Baby is like herding cats, but they’re beginning to fall into line.”

Gird your loins… it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy is published on 10 October 2013