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 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. Nor do the rival local football team, their duplicitous chairman and their corrupt dealings make things easier – let the scandals, sabotage and seductions begin… 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 With her talent for boisterous plots and dialogue, Cooper delivers feisty fun ... With this novel, Cooper shoots again and scores Daily Telegraph

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”. 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. 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 BuchananReally, though? Could one man invent these things, bring them to market and get rich enough to buy a football team? I have always doubted Cooper’s understanding of the business sphere. I had my doubts during Rivals about whether success was as easy as walking into a fundraising bid with three buttons of your shirt undone, rather than two. But, at the end of the day, she is rich and I am not. Class is complicated

When you think everyone is fantastically attractive, that helps. It’s 38 years since Rupert appeared in Riders. He is now 67, which means we met him when he was 29, although he came off more like 35. Never mind; age cannot wither him, being the handsomest man in the world. Of course, everyone biologically related to him, children and grandchildren, is outstandingly beautiful, as is his wider circle and household. It would besmirch his supremacy were he to stand next to anyone not handsome. She is to humans what David Attenborough is to animals’ … Jilly Cooper at home. Photograph: Thousand Word Media/Alamy Always wear cashmereIn 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. 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”. 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.

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 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 PooleyThe beautiful game is not an obvious choice for Jilly. It’s not posh enough compared with previous topics such as polo or classical music. You can trust her on men, haircuts, horses and dogs, clothes – but what she sweetly calls “football slang” at one point, maybe not so much. I enjoyed this helpful match report: “7–4 to Searston, who had scored the most goals so came out on top”, and the goalkeeper who rushes up the field to score a goal. 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.