Laing

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…