A funny return for hapless singleton

Hurrah! After a 14-year hiatus, Helen Fielding is back with another hilarious adventure featuring everyone’s fave singleton, Bridget Jones.

With her stream-of-consciousness inner monologue, obsession about how much she weighs and how many calories she consumes, and her outrageous friends, Bridget is once again the flawed and endearing heroine we adore in Mad About the Boy.

For the uninitiated, our Miss Jones lusted after, hated, lost and married her own perfect Mr. Darcy in the first two instalments of the series, Bridget Jones’s Diary and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason.

And now — no spoiler, as it’s right there on the jacket — Bridget is single again, the widowed mum of two small children, Billy and Mabel.

She’s struggling to find her place in the world as a screenwriter, and the “smug marrieds” have been replaced with the “perfect parents” at the school where the Darcy children go for lessons. They’re personified by Nicolette, whom Bridget calls Nicorette, like the stop-smoking gum.

Her best pals, Jude and Tom, have thrown her back into the dating game, kicking and screaming, five years after the death of her darling Mark. And a scary new world it is, with online dating, passwords, profiles and, horror of horrors, Twitter.

Fielding has such a light comic touch that I was frequently laughing out loud, much to the bafflement of the people around me.

This is a terrific sequel.