New fiction: Eligible

Curtis Sittenfeld gives Jane Austen a modern day shake-up in this fizzy, funny take on Pride and Prejudice and the perils and pitfalls of romance in the reality TV age.

Liz Bennet is writer on a feminist magazine, and her potential BF is a haughty, handsome neurosurgeon – Fitzwilliam Darcy.

But back in her childhood home in her Cincinnati she comes in for exactly the same kind of relationship interference and scrutiny that so bedeviled Austen’s Elizabeth. Some things never change, as this winning update makes clear.

Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld (The Borough Press, £14.99) is out now