One time actress Elfrida Phipps retires to a country cottage but is almost immediately reactivated through the personal tragedy of a comparatively new friend, Oscar Blundell, with whom she moves to an imposing old house, his shared inheritance, in Scotland. As Christmas approaches they are joined by a lovelorn cousin, Carrie, and her 14-year-old ni...more

Sitting on a California beach at summer's end, Jane Marsh thinks back to her childhood at the estate called Elvie in a remote corner of Scotland. She remembers not only the heather-covered hills and the lonesome loch, but her grandmother...and, of course, Sinclair. She has secretly dreamed of marrying rakishly handsome Sinclair and settling at Elvi...more

Artist's daughter, Penelope Keeling can look back on a full and varied life: a Bohemian childhood in London and Cornwall, an unhappy wartime marriage, and the one man she truly loved. She has brought up three children - and learned to accept them as they are. Yet, she is far too energetic and independent to settle sweetly into pensioned-off old-age...more

A summer holiday with her eccentric, infuriating family and assorted glamorous hangers-on is the last thing Tash French would usually volunteer for. But her mother is insistent and, out of a job and recently ditched by her boyfriend, Tash decides that spending July in the vast rambling Loire chateau might have its compensations. It's a summer of lu...more

One of the glorious Rutshire Chronicles.Into the cut-throat world of Corinium television comes Declan O’Hara, a mega-star of great glamour and integrity with a radiant feckless wife, a handsome son and two ravishing teenage daughters. Living rather too closely across the valley is Rupert Campbell-Black, divorced and as dissolute as ever, and now ...more

In Jilly Cooper's third Rutshire chronicle, we meet Ricky France-Lynch, who is moody, macho, and magnificent. He had a large crumbling estate, a nine-goal polo handicap, and a beautiful wife who was fair game for anyone with a cheque book. He also had the adoration of fourteen-year-old Perdita MacLeod. Perdita couldn't wait to leave her dreary scho...more

The English have been and always will be obsessed by class, even though they may not realize it. And Jilly Cooper has put an accurate, acerbic, and wickedly funny finger on the idiosyncracies of the English at home, whether it be in their castles, their nice villas in Weybridge, or in their high rise council flats. In Class we study the peculi...more