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

Are your carefree twenties a retreating memory? Are your friends discussing children and fixed-rate mortgages while you clutch your Xbox, sobbing? You're not the only one. 'Beta Male' is a riotously funny and painfully honest chronicle about friendship, masculinity, marriage and the beginning of the end of the beginning of adulthood.

Sam Hunt is a confused modern male in his very late twenties. A work-shy, commitment-phobic would-be actor, he is beginning to worry that turning thirty might just be the last straw. Flatmate Alan, the sensible one, has just been proposed to by his girlfriend Jess, with his femme fatale boss looking on with a saucy gleam in her eye. Newly-dumped Ed spends his time tearfully watching 'Sex and the City' in a pile of his ex-girlfriend's pajamas and plotting his revenge. Meanwhile unemployed doctor Matt embarks on a dubious bet with Sam to see who can be the first to ensnare a rich wife and enjoy a life of leisure...

Iain Hollingshead is an author and journalist. His first novel –Twenty Something – was published in May 2006. His second, Beta Male, appeared in April 2010. He has also written three spin-off books for the BBC’s BAFTA-winning spy drama Spooks, and has edited five bestselling collections of unpublished letters to The Daily Telegraph in the Am I alone in thinking…? series. He also co-authored and produced a musical – Blair on Broadway – which ran for three weeks in a pub theatre before transferring to the West End. His journalism has appeared in a wide range of publications, from the Guardian to GQ, Grazia to The Sunday Times.Regular columns have included “Loose Ends”, in the Saturday Guardian, and “Friends”, a pastiche of the coalition government in The Sunday Telegraph.