LONDON (Reuters) - British author Helen Fielding's comic creation returns to battle her insecurities in a third novel entitled "Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy" due out in October, her publisher Jonathan Cape said.
The fictional 30-something Londoner, who sprang from Fielding's newspaper column in the 1990s to become a popular novel and film franchise, is a little older in her latest outing and grappling with the cringe-making challenges of social media.
In the book, she laments the nightmare of drunken texting, skinny jeans and the fact she has no Twitter followers.
"Do not text when drunk," Jones says in an excerpt from the new novel released on Twitter and Facebook this week. "A text is gone at the brush of a fingertip, like a nuclear bomb or Exocet missile."
No more details on the plot of the new novel have been made public.
"Bridget Jones's Diary" came out in 1996, and was followed by a sequel, "Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason," in 1999. The two novels sold more than 15 million copies worldwide.
The character's bumbling appeal carried over into two films starring Renée Zellweger as Bridget, alongside Hugh Grant and Colin Firth, and spawned a genre of revelatory columns, books, television shows and films.
The new novel will also be published as an e-book and audiobook, according to Jonathan Cape, a part of the Random House publishing company.
(Reporting by Paul Casciato; editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)