If you loved Riders, and binge-watched Ted Lasso, then this is your dream novel. Pitch perfect and utterly swoon-worthy. Jilly is a genius Clare Pooley Valent Edwards says “bluddy” because he is from Yorkshire, but how else would you pronounce “bloody”? He also says “fooking”, but what accent is that? Paris Alvaston, trying to teach public schoolboy wannabe footballers how to talk common (because “footballers resent public schoolboys”), advises that they start saying “pass” to rhyme with “gas”, by which I guess one infers that the working classes of the home counties also have to adjust their accents to play football because they are only allowed to come from Leicester. A giddy, sexy, exuberant romp of a story...a total tonic, offering the sort of glorious escapism we're all desperately in need of. Daisy Buchanan She is to humans what David Attenborough is to animals’ … Jilly Cooper at home. Photograph: Thousand Word Media/Alamy Always wear cashmere It should come as no surprise, then, that Delectable, who is a horse, being the only filly in an otherwise male race and also very pretty, for a horse, is the subject of a lot of male horse attention. A lot of the male men talk as though they fancy her as well. But it’s fine, because it just makes her run faster. Chemotherapy is a nightmare

Horses also hold a lot of the dynastic energy, as each prized thoroughbred sires another who looks just like him and wins stuff. Yet, in the end, they are dispensable; they can be bitten to death by other horses (Love Rat in Mount!) without disrupting the fundamentally romantic atmosphere. So, they are almost like a dialectical echo, the melodrama against the drama, the depth against the lightness. The equine narrative architecture of Rutshire is fascinating. The horses act as repositories for all the deep human emotions, especially for the shy or overlooked characters, who can only be themselves around a horse, and also for the stiff-upper-lipped, who can only truly adore a horse. With her talent for boisterous plots and dialogue, Cooper delivers feisty fun ... With this novel, Cooper shoots again and scores Daily Telegraph Truth be told, he has been having a tantrum since he washed the vaginal deodorant out of Helen’s privates in 1985. He is always sleeping badly, and sustaining injuries, and pretending they don’t hurt, and crusading to victory (polo) with a dislocated shoulder, and covering his pain with stoicism and more tantrums. In Cooper’s telling,this is incredibly hot and he is exactly the kind of man you want in your corner (and four-poster bed). Rupert dislikes football and his first impressions of Searston are distinctly unfavourable. But as their new and indelibly competitive Chairman, he won’t stand for anything less than an Everest climb to the top of the Premier League.There's still something infectiously joyful and funny about [Cooper's] particular brand of very English writing The Observer On top of that, everyone is judged on their thinness (a character called Harmony is a “very good but rather large Assistant Head Lass” at the stables) and their looks, and any sensible woman would run a mile from rude Rupert IRL – he is an overbearing, thoughtless bully, and his own press officer says he is “going to be brilliant at running a football club – he’s so good at swearing”. His daughter persuades him to buy a failing local football team, so that he can sign up her star striker boyfriend. Rupert is not a football fan, but his competitive streak means he immediately sets about getting them to the top of the Premier League, on the way dealing with a corrupt rival team and, inevitably, a group of Wags lusting after him. Jilly Cooper was made a CBE in 2018 (Photo: John Stillwell/Getty) Nor do the rival local football team, their duplicitous chairman and their corrupt dealings make things easier – let the scandals, sabotage and seductions begin…

With the help of the club’s ravishing and adorable secretary, Tember West, and his sassy Press Officer, Dora Belvedon, he becomes increasingly fond of his riotous mix of players, despite bawling them out whenever they face defeat. A female journalist says, “I can’t cope with all this MeToo business. In my day, you said ‘eff off’ if men were awful, and ‘eff on’ if they were lush,” and her reward is that her male interview subject puts a caressing hand on “a thigh fake-tanned more orange than the car”. But outsider or not, character always shines through. If they’re a good egg, they’ll be fine. Class boundaries are melted by personality and likeability: the double-barrelled “darlings” live in happy harmony with the WAG-gy “babes”. In another Cooper hallmark, tragedy strikes the cast around Searston Rovers. Yet nobody wallows in self-pity; good things happen to the deserving people (and dogs). If only real-life were as just. Sure, there is a load of sex in every Cooper novel, but it’s told quite elliptically. These are no Fifty Shades, put it that way. When she won an OBE for services to literature in 2004, there was a lot of sniggering, mainly centred on the idea of the queen reading a book that had someone’s hand down someone else’s trousers on the cover. There was also an amount of mirth around whether or not all this counted as literature. Cooper has always had a bizarre hatred of feminists (or her narrow idea of them at least; in her books they can usually be spotted by their unshaven legs) even though all her heroines are feminists to anybody else. On the plus side she is (and always has been) supportive of gay rights, anti-racist, very unpuritan, very sex-positive.In the old days her books were passed round by teenagers sharing the dirty bits – perhaps young people don’t need that in today’s world. But the appeal, then and now, isn’t only the sex: it’s the access to a glamorous world of high-end jobs and lives and luxury trappings that readers don’t see every day, all relayed with Jilly’s signature warmth, humour and good-heartedness. Rupert’s explosive arrival at Searston causes outrage, so the fights are as furious off the field as on – particularly when glamorous WAGS flood in to stir up trouble and lust after Rupert… It’s funny, with all this wish fulfilment (these chronicles get more and more like fairytales as they go along), to get a cold-hairdryer of medical reality. But you know how, in literary novels, no one ever has a job? It’s the same with cancer; they either get it and die or they get it and – plot twist – don’t die. None of them mention sitting on a plastic chair with a chemo drip, then their wee being mauve and their poo being like gravel. This is a useful corrective to the prevailing thinking on cancer – “stay positive”. Even if you don’t die, it’s still absolutely awful. Give entrepreneurialism a shot – it’s much easier than it looks