Meet Lisa Doyle – box office manager, professional dinner-for-one expert, and quite possibly Manchester’s last remaining singleton. At least, that’s how it feels when she discovers she’s the only one from her school year who hasn’t got a ring on her finger.
After one too many glasses of wine and a moment of social media madness, Lisa invents a husband. Not just any husband – an astronaut who saves children from lions in his spare time. It seemed like a brilliant idea at the time…
But when her childhood friend Helen announces her engagement and asks Lisa to be maid of honour, things get complicated. Suddenly she’s juggling a fake marriage that’s spiralling out of control, her gorgeous-but-married boss Brian (who might just be interested in more than ticket sales), her gay best friend Andy (who’s about to become an unlikely porn star), and the return of Ginny Baker, the school bully who made her teenage years hell.
Laugh-out-loud funny and genuinely heartwarming, The Armchair Bride is a story about friendship, finding yourself, and learning that sometimes the best relationships aren’t the ones you make up on Facebook.
Mo Fanning grew up near Birmingham in the UK but left for pastures new as soon as he could legally drive, spending much of his grown-up life in the Netherlands, before returning home just before lockdown took hold.
He has contributed to 100 Stories for Haiti and written for the Observer travel section. His first novel ‘The Armchair Bride’ was nominated for Arts Council Book of the Year, and his work was turned into a short play for BBC America. After having lived in Manchester, Amsterdam, Lyon and Brighton, he’s back in the West Midlands determined to get on top of his geraniums.
Mo writes upmarket commercial and book club fiction.