New Bridget Jones book to be published in October

A fourth book detailing the trials and tribulations of Bridget Jones is to be published in October.

Bridget Jones’s Baby: The Diaries by Helen Fielding will come out a month after a new film, titled Bridget Jones’s Baby, hits cinemas.

Both follow the character’s “somewhat bumpy journey into motherhood” after she gets pregnant, and the “terribly awkward” question of who the father is.

Bridget first appeared in a column in The Independent newspaper in 1995.

A book version of the fictional diaries became a best-seller the following year, and was followed by two more full novels and two films.

The most recent book, Mad About The Boy, came out in 2013 and revealed Bridget had married Mark Darcy and had produced two children – but Darcy was killed off in the interim between the second and third books.

Publisher Jonathan Cape said the new book would be set after the events in 1999’s The Edge of Reason but before Mad About The Boy.

Fielding said: “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.

The upcoming film, which is released on 16 September, will see Renee Zellweger return to the title role.

In the movie, Bridget becomes pregnant but does not know whether the father is Darcy, played by Colin Firth, or American billionaire Jack Qwant, played by Patrick Dempsey.

Hugh Grant, who played a love interest in the previous films, is not thought to feature this time.

The screenplay has been co-written by Emma Thompson, who also appears as a midwife.