Olivia and Jed are spending the 10th anniversary of when and where they met on a romantic weekend in Barcelona before the arrival of their first baby in a few months. Or at least that's what Jed thinks! In reality Olivia plans to propose to Jed and has secretly organised the subsequent wedding including inviting close family and friends to join them the following day. Jed says 'Yes' to the wedding proposal but it soon becomes clear that this was the answer he thought he should give rather than the one he wanted to give.
The rest of the story takes in the couples' various friends and family and their ongoing relationship issues and baggage. One by one they line up to give Jed advice and counselling in the hope that he can get over his extreme case of 'cold feet' despite the fact that they all seem to be in the throes of relationship issues themselves.
This was a very light, quick and funny read and I did enjoy it despite not being my usual type of book.
Many thanks to Netgalley and publishers for the ARC in exchange for an honest review - well worth a read!

Interesting premise of a woman who surprises her long-time boyfriend with a wedding where all he has to do is show up. However. The promise was not realized for me -- possibly the book is meant for a different audience, not for this reader.

I loved At The Wedding.
A great page turner that kept me hooked from the first few pages.
Another great read by Matt Dunn, have a read you won’t be disappointed.

In Barcelona, Livia proposes to her boyfriend of ten years, Jed. (Livia is also 6 months pregnant). Livia tells Jed that everything (and everyone) is arranged and that all Jed has to do is say "I do".

Both Livia and Jed go through a myriad of emotions in two days - wedding ring predicaments, legality of the wedding, not to mention their friends and relatives...

Of course there is one-time famous Liam, Jed's brother, who never really wins at love. Patrick, older, divorced and dating 22 year old Izzy.

And the Maid of Honor - Rachel - who does not want to be alone. Yet, love may find her at the strangest of moments.


This all ends up on a rather light note. Recommend for a fast, cute read !

At the Wedding is such an engaging book loaded with quirky people, funny incidents, head trips, and perfect match-ups in personalities. Tons of stuff goes off the rails as six friends gather for a surprise (for the groom) wedding in Barcelona. The air is rife with personal doubts and quandaries. The only true things are the wedding venue and time. You can expect topsy-turvy decisions until the very end.

Livia invites her best friends to a destination wedding. But she hasn’t told her boyfriend yet. And they aren’t engaged yet. And the wedding is the following day.

Livia and Jed have been together for ten years. They are happy together but they haven’t talked about marriage. They didn’t talk much about kids either until they decided to stop trying not to have them.
Now Livia is 6 months pregnant and she wants to marry Jed. She can’t believe he’s never thought to ask, especially with their baby on the way.

So she took matters into her own hands. She proposes to Jed. Then she surprises him with the fact that their wedding is the following day. She had planned everything, she even invited their best friends and his brother.

The only problem is Jed’s cold feet.

It’s hard to imagine that these two could have been together for ten years without talking about Jed’s issues with marriage.
It’s also hard to believe that Livia thinks springing a surprise wedding on him is a good idea.

In the background we’ve got the characters:
Rachel—Livia’s friend who just broke up with her boyfriend of two years
Patrick—mutual friend of Livia and Jed—still damaged from his divorce and dating Izzy who is less than half his age
Liam—Jed’s brother—billed as a “lady’s man” but he’s actually pretty awkward around most women
Izzy—Patrick’s 23 year old girlfriend—loves to shop, has zero in common with Patrick, seems to make him reflect on his life and drive him crazy in equal parts

Most of the story is about relationship issues. Some parts of the story are a real stretch to find believable, I guess I can’t mention my example without calling it a spoiler.

That said, it’s a light, quick read. It’s interesting to see each of the characters trying to admit to and overcome their own issues.

I got to read an early e book edition through NetGalley. Thanks!

This was an entertaining book. Livia has organized a trip to Barcelona with her long-term boyfriend, Jed, and several friends. It's the tenth anniversary for Livia and Jed, and they are getting married! Everyone knows this is the plan - except Jed, who finds out the night before the ceremony. The story follows that day and the next for Livia, Jed and their guests. I enjoyed this book and would recommend it to others.

This book has many pov but the main story is about Jed and Livia who go to Barcelona to celebrate their 10th anniversary and to have a weekend away before they baby is born. Livia proposes to Jed and tell him their closest friends are flying from England for the surprise weeding. Jed its not so happy with the idea of marriage or being pushed into doing it, but anyway he says yes.
Then is where the other characters come into place. Liam, Jed´s brother and best man at the weeding, Patrick and her girlfriend Izzy and Rachel, whos Livia´s best friend. All the characters will be dealing with their own personal issues while trying to convince Jed and help Livia to get married.

I think is a fast paced story, it has its fun moments but there´s one particular thing I just can´t ignore because it bother me the hole book and that´s why I only gave it three stars. There might be spoilers below!
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In the book we get to know Patrick, his gone through a divorce after finding her wife cheating. Now he´s 50 years old and its dating a 22 year old girl. (I think this is what this means the ‘mid-life crisis’ on the book description). So I get it, his old, dating a younger woman, nothing wrong with that, so WHY the author decided to use this kind of phrases?

"Like the car, Izzy had a maintenance cost too, and Patrick much preferred paying maintenance for something he could still enjoy rather than someone he couldn´t"

"Everything cost. My divorce certainly did, and that wasn´t even my fault! so if you´re going to be paying, you might as well get what you want"

HE´S TALKING ABOUT A PERSON, not a thing… nobody needs to be bought, and seems he is buying her things in exchange for sex because he explicitly says he does not want anything else rather than "have fun" with her, and even seems he sees it like an allowance he needs to pay to keep having it…

I dont know if it was just me, but that kind of things made me wanted to stop reading the book, although I do think its a fun rom-com and you can flight through it.

Relaxing read. It's what I call an easy read. Doesn't require too much thinking. Yet again it's another new author that before today I had never heard of.
I shall certainly be looking for books written by Matt Dunn.
Thank you to both Netgalley and Late Union Publishing for giving me the opportunity to read ’At the Wedding by Matt Dunn in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.

A fun book with a lot of LOL moments. An easy read. Light hearted. Well developed characters. Made me want to go back to Barcelona.
Matt Dunn is a new author to me but one I will definitely be reading more from.

I liked the story but at the beginning I wasn't too gone on Livva's character as I thought she was very pushy and took no one else's feelings into consideration but as the book went on, I changed my mind about her. I have never read anything by the author before and while romantic fiction isn't usually my genre, this one caught my attention from the blurb and I'll be back for more. I would like to thank the publishers and netgalley for letting me have the arc to review for an honest opinion and the views expressed are entirely my own and are unbiased.

At the Wedding is a really fun (and, surprisingly realistic) story! The entire novel spans the 48 hours of Livia and Jed's wedding in Barcelona. Everything, from the surprise proposal, the arguments, the drama with the guests, the pregnancy complications, and the ceremony itself is carried out with heart and humor. This book is a great escape!

I received this book free from NetGalley in exchange for my honest and unbiased opinion.

I was looking for a light carefree read and At the Wedding was just that. It is quick and light and I finished it in less than a few hours. Unfortunately, the storylines fell flat for me and left me feeling like I threw away half of a perfectly made sandwich knowing I'd have finished it later. The characters were kind of bland and other than the a few conflicts there isn't much that will be memorable from the book.

At The Wedding on the surface seems to be a light-hearted novel about a pregnant girlfriend who proposes to her boyfriend of 10 years. The day before the secret wedding she's arranged with a few select friends as guests.
But its so much deeper than that. Each person at this secret wedding is dealing with issues relating to relationships and where they fit in in their life.
Liam - a playboy - preferring married/taken women so as to have no emotional ties to anyone.
Patrick - burnt by divorce - with a girlfriend almost the same age as his daughter.
Rachel - compromiser in her relationships - trying to find herself and be happy on her own without having to settle for second best.
Jed - the reluctant groom-to-be - scared of marriage due to his past and worried about getting married.
Livia - the pregnant bride-to-be - wants the security of marriage especially now that she's 6 months pregnant.
All of them boarded flights to Barcelona with just the thought of the wedding that lay ahead (okay not Jed as he was going to celebrate his 10 year anniversary - clueless as to the wedding). But as the weekend progresses each one makes a personal journey and in doing so, sort of let go of some of the things holding them back.
A lovely read. Small group of well developed characters. I really enjoyed this book.

Jed and Livia have been dating for ten years and are expecting a baby in a couple of months. She has planned a weekend in Barcelona, to celebrate their meeting ten years ago. She has invited Liam, Jed's brother who was the second runner-up on Big Brother and is still trying to live on that glory; newly divorced Patrick, who is jaded about love and marriage and has brought his much younger girlfriend, Izzy; and Rachel, Livia's best friend who has just been dumped by her boyfriend. What Jed doesn't know (but everyone else does) is that Livia is going to propose to him and has planned a wedding for the next day.

Needless to say, Jed is shocked with the proposal but goes along with it. But he doesn't see why they have to get married as things are fine as they are. He spends his wedding day deciding if he wants to go through with it or not and if he doesn't, how does he break it to Livia?

I've read many books by this author and liked this one. I enjoyed the writing style and found it amusing. It is written by an English author so their humour was there. It was written in third person perspective from various points of view (wherever the action was). I liked the characters, though I wasn't crazy about Livia at first ... she seemed selfish at first by putting Jed on the spot and pressuring him into marriage. It said a lot about their relationship if she couldn't be honest with him. I found Izzy a bit extreme and childish at times and don't know how the more mature Patrick would tolerate her. As a head's up, there is some swearing.

Never really a good idea to surprise your groom (who doesn't know he's a groom) with a wedding, let alone a destination wedding. Nonetheless, Dunn has managed to write a humorous take on this. Livia and Jed do love each other but they just haven't gotten married. Now they're in Barcelona and well, guess what's on the agenda! Thanks to Netgalley for the aRC. This is light and it would make a good rom-com.

This book opens with Livia essentially roping longtime boyfriend Jed into a surprise wedding ceremony, and then follows the next turbulent 48 hours of the couple and their friends who are arriving in Barcelona for the wedding, and bringing their own relationship issues with them.

I have to admit that when I first read the blurb on this one, I was a bit skeptical, but I've read nearly all of Matt Dunn's novels and I have a soft spot for him, so I wanted to read it anyway. I wound up being unable to put it down and disappointed when I turned the page to find acknowledgements instead of more book. This is definitely now one of my favorites from this author, and favorites in general. It is witty, funny, honest, dramatic, hopeful and poignant all at once, and highly entertaining as we get to switch between the points of view of the various characters. I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC!

I absolutely loved Matt’s last book, 13 Dates; it contained everything that this genre needs to make it a perfect read. I was therefore delighted to see At the Wedding available for review and as I had just finished a book, I couldn’t wait to read it.
I was so disappointed; the characters were all cliches and the main plot was predictable. Only Matt’s interesting writing and my hope that the book would improve or that the characters would go against type kept me reading.
If this had been my first book by Matt Dunn, I would not be inclined to read another, but having read and thoroughly enjoyed 13 Dates I will continue to read his books and I am sure this was just a blip.

I have no idea how Matt Dunn manages it, but not for the first time has has written a book based around the events of a short space of time - this time around its 48 hours and manages to fit in so many twists and turns along the way to keep readers on their toes.

At times I was so engrossed in this book that a waitress made me jump out of my skin, as I hadn't seen her approach and I'm still not sure how I returned home as I don't recall seeing most of the stops!

The book is not the only thing that is fast paced, so is the time between proposal and wedding, for Livia's and Je. To say that Jed was rather surprised at the real reason they were in Barcelona, would be an understatement.

Followed up with the following day assorted friends and family arrive for the wedding, all of whom have been sworn to secrecy.

The focal point switches around between some of the main characters,so you were able to get to know them a bit better. I really did love all members of the main wedding part, and some of the supplementary people were also great to meet.

I love how clever this author is in creating a believable storyline, with plenty of action and humour but using such a small timeline. Each character shows some development in their view towards relationships over the course of the book. I loved Liam's continual flirting, Izzy's shopaholic tendencies, Patrick's father figure approach to the group, Rachel's sightseeing is particularly memorable as is Jed's reaction to the proposal

Another gem of a book from Dunn, reminding me once more of just how much I love this author. If you are already a fan then you will understand when I say it has all of his trademark style and is a must read. If you have never tried a Matt Dunn book, then this is certainly a great example of what he is capable of.

Thank you to Lake Union Publishing and Matt Dunn for this copy which I have reviewed honestly and voluntarily.