Etta and Mrs Wilkinson save each other, and the filly is a catalyst redeeming or condemning (each according to their worth) a whole cast of characters. I felt fairly uncomfortable as well with some of the work that Jilly did involving Pakistanis and Al Qaeda (I will leave you to wonder how she encompassed this into the world of jump racing! When her bullying husband dies, Etta ‘s selfish, ambitious children drag her from her lovely Dorset house to live in a hideous modern bungalowin the Cotswold village of Willowwood. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. That said, the real love story, between Etta and the unvarnishable Valent, falters tentatively along in a deeply endearing way and is all the more appealing set against the frantic jodhpur-ripping that's taking place elsewhere.

Thank you for giving me another wonderful ready, I can’t wait for your next book about Rupert turning 60. It has taken me 3 months to read – simply because I wanted to stretch my reading time to as long as possible, because I didn’t want to finish reading the book. Missing her dog and her home, she stumbles on a grey filly, starving and near to death in the woods. Surrounded by a vast cast of characters, the central story is that of a mare who gave Etta back her life.Ridden by Rupert's delectable god-daughter, Amber, Mrs Wilkinson captivates vast crowds as she progresses from point-to-point to major races and brings fame and fortune to the syndicate, until, at last, she is entered in the Grand National.

In the late 1970s she published a guide to the subject that elaborated on Mitford's famous list of upper class "U" and "non-U terms". Etta's life changes when, in the snow in nearby woods, she finds a horribly mutilated filly, which she names Mrs Wilkinson and nurses back to health. Unlike the permatanned fantasies of her contemporary Jackie Collins, Cooper's world was earthy, the urban glamour literally grounded by a muddy shire Tory circuit of hunt balls and point-to-points. doesn't compare to my memory of Riders, Polo or The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous, but the last 300 pages are classic Jilly. In fact, I'll eat if my hat if when Rupert Campbell-Black finally kicks the bucket he doesn't get, at the very least, an obituary in the Telegraph, if not a full-blown state funeral.At her best, Jilly Cooper has a genius for combining soft-focus romance with the beady, pitiless social comedy of Jane Austen, or at least Nancy Mitford. The only thing on earth that made me want to read this book was that it was about horse racing, I'm a racing fanatic so the story of finding an abused horse near to death and saving it and turning it into a champion attracted me.