STEPHEN LEWIS talks to a Yorkshire lass whose high-flying romantic comedy is making a stir.

ANNIE Waller has got some killer one liners: but then, what else would you expect from a former PR girl?

"It's like having three in a marriage - but at least my husband's mistress weighs 75,000 kilos," she quips of her RAF-pilot husband Trev.

She's referring, thankfully, to Trev's RAF Hercules transport plane - not to some odd fetish he has for the fattest woman in history. Though according to Annie, the Hercules is more demanding than any woman.

North Yorkshire born Annie's debut novel Married To Albert is a witty comedy of modern manners and courtship which is already making waves in book circles.

It tells the story of Kate - a tall, straight-talking, party-obsessed York PR girl who falls big-time for a handsome hunk of a pilot from RAF Linton-on-Ouse.

Narrated in a breathless diary style, the opening pages are all madcap partying, PR-girl hilarity and Bridget Jones-style self-deprecation.

Kate spends her days as a secretary in the offices of posh York PR firm Panache, and her evenings attending sex toy parties and teetering from pub to pub down the Micklegate Run in high heels and short skirts, arm-in-arm with her best mate Siobhan.

Then, one evening in the King's Arms, she locks eyes with Guy, a "tall, good-looking blond bloke, standing at the bar, laughing." It turns out he's a trainee pilot at RAF Linton. It's lust at first sight.

So far, so chick-lit (a genre Annie admits she loves).

Then, however, Kate and Guy get married - at St Michael-le-Belfrey church - and the story moves into new territory. There is a blissful honeymoon, summarised in a single sentence ("Sorry, diary - no time to write. Too busy being blissfully happy enjoying sun, sand, sea, shopping and sex") and then Kate wakes up to the cold reality of being an RAF wife.

Guy is posted to RAF Lyneham in Wiltshire. The happy couple move into stark married quarters on base - and then Guy is sent overseas and Kate is left on her own.

It comes as a shock - and it mirrors exactly what happened to her in her real-life marriage, says Annie, who was brought up in Hillam near Selby and went to school at Sherburn High and Selby College.

"I had given up family, friends, job, county... I had given up everything for a man who was seldom around," she says.

She also found life in the forces hard to adjust to - with or without her husband at her side.

"From being an independent girl, I was suddenly in this alien world," she laughs. "It is a world where a wife can't wear a pair of trousers to a function or her husband doesn't get promoted. Where women would knock on your door and say 'hello, I'm Flight Lieutenant Smith's wife.' I used to think 'how did you get that name? When did you stop being Jane or Sarah and just become someone's wife?' It really annoyed me and I thought 'I'm not having it'."

The novel is a no-holds-barred but unfailingly humorous look at how Kate learns to cope with this alien world. It is a world of real loneliness and often genuine emotional pain, Annie says. But there is a plus side to forces life, too.

"It is like being in a big family - all the wives get to live in each-other's pockets."

Annie's novel, released quietly last November, has been getting rave reviews on Amazon, and has even attracted the attention of the national press - not to mention the RAF Benevolent Fund, which has posted a review and interview with Annie on its website.

"I married a fairytale but live with banter, loneliness and am only recognised through the rank of my husband," she says in it.

She believes it's the only novel of its kind to tell the story of a forces marriage from the wife's point of view - and she's had loads of comments from other wives about what it meant to them. "I've even had retired Wing Commanders come up and say 'it hasn't changed since I was in'," she says.

In real life, she and Trev - a Flight Lieutenant and RAF display pilot - pulled through. They have now been married nine years, and have two children - Henry, five, and Kate Scarlett, one-and-a-half. After many ups and downs, Annie jokes, "he has learned to worship the ground I waddle on".

But will married life prove so enduring for Kate and Guy? You'll have to read the book to find out.

Married To Albert is published by Boltneck, priced £6.99.

Updated: 16:37 Friday, February 10, 2006