I stole my first Jilly Cooper from my stepmother. She spent summer holidays in the late 1980s supine on a sunbed, working on her tan while immersed in fat white paperbacks of Riders and Rivals. I smuggled both books home as contraband, knowing they would be confiscated by my mother as inappropriate for a barely teenaged girl.
Riders was Jilly’s first foray into the bonkbuster, a muddier, merrier take on the sex and shopping novels of Shirley Conran and Jackie Collins, set in the world of international show-jumping and starring that handsome, ruthless rake Rupert Campbell-Black. It went on to sell millions worldwide, and marked the beginning of the phenomenally successful Rutshire Chronicles, the 11th volume of which has just been published. Inevitably called Tackle!, it examines the fate of rival football teams, one of which is owned by RC-B, now putting the sex into sexagenarian.
