Four Friends, Three Assumed Identities, Two Weddings and One Very Dangerous Bet

New in bookstores this month is Iain Hollingshead's hilarious new novel Beta Male.

Hollingshead won great acclaim for his debut novel Twentysomething, which Booklist described as “pure comic gold” and the Chicago Sun-Times anointed as a “Bridget Jones’s diary for the fellas.” It also won the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award in 2006.

Now Hollingshead continues his absorbing and hilarious chronicles of modern men with Beta Male, a story of four friends, three assumed identities, two weddings, and one very dangerous bet. Sam Hunt is a confused male in his very late twenties. A work-shy, commitment-phobic actor, he is beginning to worry that turning thirty might be the last straw. Beta males one and all, Sam and his friends are desperately clinging to their independence, while secretly they are all terrified of ending up alone. Alan has just been proposed to by his girlfriend. Newly-dumped Ed spends his time tearfully watching Sex and the City. Meanwhile unemployed doctor Matt makes a dubious bet with Sam to see who can be the first to ensnare a rich wife and enjoy a life of leisure. Beta Male is a funny and painfully honest chronicle about friendship, masculinity, marriage and the beginning of the end of the beginning of adulthood.

Based in London, Iain Hollingshead is a feature writer at The Daily Telegraph , the editor of Am I Alone in Thinking..? Unpublished Letters to the Daily Telegraph and the author of two novels. He has also written three tie-in books for the BBC's BAFTA-winning spy drama, Spooks.