The greatest wedding scenes in fiction

There you are, in your best dress, eyes moist with affection at the thought your friend has found true love and happiness in an era of ghosting and Tinder. Her gorgeous white lace gown, his Cheshire-cat smile. Bridesmaids in avocado taffeta carrying jam jars filled with wild flowers, champagne on the lawn, a sweltering marquee, a drunken uncle who forgot to key the soles of his new shoes falling over on the dance floor. A cake made of cheese?

Hello, it's wedding season.

Except, none of us are going to any weddings this summer. You might not even be going to your own wedding, if yours was one of the thousands up and down Britain that got crashed by the coronavirus lockdown this year.

But there is at least one sort of wedding we can still attend – the sort found only between the pages of great literature. So, without further ado, dearly beloved, here is a selection of some of our favourite weddings in fiction.

Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan (2013)

A $40 million dollar mega-wedding is the flavour of Kevin Kwan's uproarious social satire about the lives of Asia's jet-setting super rich. And boy it is a wedding.

When Singaporean super-heir Nick brings his naive "ABC" – American-born Chinese – girlfriend, Rachel home for the wedding of his billionaire best friend, Colin Khoo, Rachel is thrown into a world of private islands, palaces and jets. And she soon learns the hard way quite how eligible her boyfriend is. “Expect private-jet gridlock at Changi Airport and road closures all over the CBD this weekend as Singapore witnesses its own royal wedding,” predicts a local news report ahead of their arrival at the ceremony.

There are no flowers inside the church, “but there was no need, because suspended from the ceiling were thousands of young Aspen trees, meticulously arranged to create a vaulted forest floating just above everyone’s heads.”

Then the lights dim, The Vienna Boys' Choir light the aisle with fireflies in jars, and the bride materialises – flanked by bridesmaids carrying cherry blossom branches – “like a Pre-Raphaelite maiden floating through a sun-dappled forest.” 

It gets wilder, too - a spine-tingling snapshot of the incredible lengths the world's decimal-percent like to tie the knot.