Books by Helen Fielding
Bridget Jones's Baby: The Diaries
by Helen Fielding
🏆 Winner of the 2017 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction
The fourth book in the Bridget Jones's Diary series sees our hapless heroine revisiting her love triangle with kind-but-stiff human rights lawyer Mark Darcy and the womanising publishing executive Daniel Cleaver when a brief rupture in her otherwise happy relationship ends with Bridget pregnant, but with no idea who the father might be. This cheering romantic comedy offers more of the same, for all those who can't get enough of dear Bridget.
Bridget Jones's Diary
by Helen Fielding
Bridget Jones's Diary, the book, was based on Helen Fielding's column in the Independent. It was published in 1996 and became a worldwide bestseller. It is very, very loosely modelled on Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, with the plot focusing on the modern equivalent: a 30-something singleton working in London who hopes to fall in love and find a husband. It is both very funny and yet captures the loneliness of 20th-century life.
“I believe it is the only novel about emergency response. This is quite odd, considering that it often dominates our news and so many people donate to aid organisations. And it’s written by Helen Fielding, who is best known for Bridget Jones’s Diary. She tells a good story. It is the story of a woman who drops her boyfriend and well-paid job in London and goes to a made-up African country. This part is slightly odd because it could very easily have been a real one. To me it seems based on Ethiopia as there is the background of conflict and it was published after the 1984 famine. The main character gets involved in the relief efforts after the famine and feels really strongly about it. She returns to London and to her previous business contacts and her boyfriend and persuades them to fundraise. She returns to Africa with money and a media team to publicise what’s going on. It’s a slightly simplistic version rather than a complex account, but it’s a good read and having worked in emergency response myself I believe it’s a pretty accurate portrayal of what goes on.” Read more...
Cassie Knight, Nonprofit Leaders & Activist
Interviews where books by Helen Fielding were recommended
The best books on Aid Work, recommended by Cassie Knight
From 2001 to 2003, Cassie Knight lived and worked in Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of Congo, managing a humanitarian aid program after the 1999 civil war. Here, she recommends books on aid work, and its realities as well as inspiring books about it.
Books Becoming Movies in 2025
As a way of choosing books, selecting those that are being made into movies should be a good way to go. Why spend millions bringing a book to the screen unless it has an unusually spellbinding plot or is a particularly wonderful evocation of a time and place? Below are some of the books film directors have seen worthy of turning into movies in 2025.
The Funniest Books of the 21st Century
This year, to mark its 25th anniversary, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction set out to find the funniest book of the last twenty-five years. We asked comedian Tatty Macleod, one of the judges, about the process of sifting through 25 previous winners to find the funniest book of the 21st century.
