A Beautiful Day for a Wedding: This year’s Bridget Jones!
A wonderfully heartwarming and feel good novel about love in all its forms. Katie Fforde meets Lucy Vine! What could possibly go wrong?Wedding journalist Eve is over the moon when her three best friends and her brother all decide to get married in the same summer. But when she finds out the man she once thought she’d be walking up the aisle with is back in the country and on all the guestlists, she can’t wait for wedding season to be over.As if Ben’s sudden reappearance isn’t enough, her bridezilla besties have her polishing floors, searching for giant flamingos and dog-sitting while they jet off on honeymoon. Her only release is writing an anonymous column full of her bitter bridesmaid tales – she just needs to make sure the happy couples never find out…Between facing her relationship demons and juggling her maid-of-honour duties, is Eve doomed to be left out of this summer of love?What readers are saying about Charlotte Butterfield:‘You’ll laugh, cry, and say “Oh! No!” Definitely a fun weekend read’ Meg, Goodreads‘One of the funniest books of the year!’ Lianne, Goodreads‘Will leave you with a massive smile on your face and feeling great and ready for the summer’ Karen Whittard‘Perfect for wedding season!’ Being Unique Books
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HarperImpulse
an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperImpulse 2018
Copyright © Charlotte Butterfield 2018
Cover illustration © Shutterstock.com
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Charlotte Butterfield asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008302719
Ebook Edition © May 2018 ISBN: 9780008302702
Version: 2018-04-18
Table of Contents
To Team P: Ed, Amélie, Rafe and Theo
How to be the perfect bridesmaid. Rule number one: Start mourning the friend you love, because once she becomes entangled in wedding planning, she doesn’t exist anymore.
Gone are the easy chats about life, love and the universe, and in its place are endless one-sided monologues about whether it would be unreasonable to ask all the bridesmaids to pierce their ears so they can wear matching earrings (answer: yes). Evenings will be spent pondering the question of whether tulips are too cheap, orchids too expensive or peonies too try-hard. Who cares? They’ll either end up swept up with the confetti by an Eastern European cleaner on minimum wage in the morning, or carefully preserved in an airing cupboard by the groom’s granny. You know the friend that’s always been very supportive about your extra curves? Well, as soon as that sparkly solitaire gets slipped on her finger she’ll ‘accidentally’ order your bridesmaid dress a size too small forcing you to eat blended kale for a month before the wedding.
Let’s talk hen dos for just a moment. What a wonderful opportunity for some sisterhood solidarity, where dignity and self-consciousness are checked in with your coat at the door and the order of the day is friendship and fun. Wrong. Don’t even think about surprising the bride with an activity, theme or outfit she hasn’t approved. In writing. She may say that you have the power of attorney on this weekend, but she doesn’t mean it, she’s lying through her newly-whitened teeth – which brings me onto the subject of beauty. The role of a bridesmaid is to be pretty, but not too much. Save those fake eyelashes for another occasion, because God forbid you should have longer lash-action than the woman in white. By all means brush your hair, possibly even add a bit of bounce, but do not consider having an up-do that takes more than two minutes to construct. That’s her arena. The only part of your grooming routine you shouldn’t scrimp on is deodorant. You’ll need at least half a can sprayed into your armpits at all times to counteract the iron-woman training that you’ll be forced to do in the week before the big day. Fill your car with petrol, top up your oyster card, stash your heels for another day, and flex those limbs because good God are you going to be using them. Unless you are already a PA to the president of a small country, never before will you have been faced with a To Do List of the gargantuan proportions that you will soon be handed. And the best part is, you have to smile like Mary Poppins while cheerily crossing each item off. Hem curtains? Check. Polish floors? Check. Dog-sit for a fortnight? Che— Fuck. Fuck fuck fuckity fuck.
Eve had no idea that her legs could even move that fast. Weaving in and out of office workers, shoving tourists out of the way, hurdling over open drains, and banging on the sides of open-top buses, she finally made it to the front of her friend Tanya’s apartment block. Steadying herself on the gate for a moment to let the burning sensation in her lungs subside, she silently offered up a little prayer that she wasn’t about to walk into the rotting carcass of a pedigree pug.
