We're getting a new Bridget Jones book this autumn

Bookshops are expecting the arrival of Bridget Jones's Baby: The Diaries, a new book from author Helen Fielding, this autumn. Official due date: 11th October.

The book is something of a surprise arrival. The upcoming third movie in the franchise – also entitled Bridget Jones's Baby – was previously not believed to have a corresponding novel.

And Fielding's most recent book, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, which was published in 2013, was set well into Bridget's future, at a time when her children are grown up and her husband Mark Darcy is, #spoiler, dead. So we can only assume Bridget Jones’s Baby: The Diaries will be set before that, during her first pregnancy.

The new book, which follows the release of the much-anticipated third movie on 16th September, will be based on Fielding's original columns, chronicling Bridget's "somewhat bumping journey into motherhood" with a pregnancy "full of cheesy potatoes, outlandish advice from Drunken Singletons and Smug Mothers, chaos at scans and childbirth classes, high jinks and romance, joy and despair." And of course the "terribly awkward" question of who the baby's father actually is...

"At heart Bridget Jones is about the gap between how we all feel we’re expected to be and how we actually are and – as Bridget discovers with her somewhat bumpy pregnancy – how we expect life to turn out and how it actually does. I’m excited to see Bridget’s world on the big screen again, and delighted to be published by Jonathan Cape," says Fielding.

Bridget Jones's Baby will be in UK cinemas 16th September