William Walker’s First Year of Marriage

For anyone who has ever dreamed of finding true love only to discover that happy endings are just the beginning comes this brilliantly comic novel about marriage, ex-girlfriends, ‘performance anxiety’, and what it takes to make happily ever last beyond the honeymoon.

William Walker has just married Isabel, the girl of his dreams. The happy couple live in a small flat in north London while William labours away at his magazine job, revelling in his recent promotion from a column for which he was required to taste different brands of cat food to more dignified reportage. So far, so perfect.

But William has a Bridget Jones-ish knack for messing up the happiest of situations – he can’t help shouting at the obnoxiously precocious work experience girl and has an embarrassing tendency to forget names of women he has previously tried to sleep with. It doesn’t help that Isabel’s creepy best friend Alex is very obviously in love with her. Nor that Saskia, a vixen-ish old flame of William’s, has just moved in downstairs. As Alex slithers his way into Isabel’s heart, Saskia seems intent on resuming relations with William – or at least giving Isabel that impression.

Increasingly beset, increasingly unlucky and increasingly hilarious, William battles his way through a series of comic disasters that threaten to destroy his relationship and reduce him to a state of sad bachelorhood – a fate, he soon realises, worse than death.

Reviews

‘Matt Rudd’s sparklingly energetic, sometimes laugh-aloud, sometimes touching novel…mixes the accident-prone and amiable prattishness of Lucky Jim and Bridget Jones with a liberal dollop of farce.…William turns out to be an innocent searching for the right path.…Getting to know him is to enter into the blundering, puzzled hell of the male up against the eternal feminine enigma.’ Elizabeth Buchan, Sunday Times

‘Hilarious and hugely enjoyable. A frank, funny insight into what men really think about women and marriage.’ Tracy Quan, author of Diary of a Jetssetting Call Girl

‘Writing genius…the hilarious insights into a man’s mind will make you laugh out loud’ Cosmo

'Meet the male Bridget Jones. William’s just married and has a view on everything from ex-girlfirends and wives to male best friends and work. But his luck takes a hilarious turn for the worse. Be prepared to LOL on the train. 5 stars’ Company Magazine

'Matt Rudd's sparklingly energetic, sometimes laugh-aloud, sometimes touching novel gives us a further heads-up: actually, the Beast longs to be tamed.' The Sunday Times

About the author

Matt Rudd is senior writer at the Sunday Times. In the name of journalism, he has worn a short skirt in public, had a tour of a £300,000 lettuce shredder and stood outside Pippa Middleton’s book launch for six hours in the freezing cold. In the name of this book, he has spent the last two years on the road with binoculars, a notebook and many Red Bulls. He lives in Kent with his family. Follow him @mattrudd.