To accompany forthcoming film of the same name, the book will recount the bestselling heroine’s ‘somewhat bumpy journey into motherhood’

Bridget Jones is back: author Helen Fielding has reunited with her bumbling, much-loved creation yet again, with the latest instalment in her misadventures set to come out in October.

Bridget Jones’s Baby: The Diaries, to be published on 11 October with Jonathan Cape, will focus on Bridget’s “somewhat bumpy journey into motherhood”. It will follow the release of the forthcoming film of the same name on 16 September, which was previously believed to not have a corresponding book.

Renée Zellweger returns in first trailer for Bridget Jones's Baby Read more

“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,” Fielding said. “I’m excited to see Bridget’s world on the big screen again, and delighted to be published by Jonathan Cape.”

The previous instalment in the franchise, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, which came out in 2013, was set well into the future of Fielding’s hapless heroine, at a time when her children are grown up and her husband Mark Darcy is dead.

However, it appears that Bridget Jones’s Baby will be set before that, during her first pregnancy: “As she careers towards baby-deadline, tortured by Smug Mothers miming her ticking biological clock, a series of classic Bridget Jones moments finally leads her into pregnancy – but just not quite as intended. It’s a pregnancy full of cheesy potatoes, outlandish advice… chaos at scans and childbirth classes, high jinks and romance, joy and despair – but all of it dominated by the terribly awkward question: ‘Who’s the Father?’”

Fielding’s debut novel, Bridget Jones’s Diary, drew upon Fielding’s anonymous column that she began writing for UK newspaper the Independent in 1995. It was a global phenomenon when it was first published in 1996, and together with the 1999 sequel, Bridget Jones: the Edge of Reason, sold more than 15m copies worldwide.