Jump!: Another joyful and dramatic romp from Jilly Cooper, the Sunday Times bestseller

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But, everyone falls in love with Etta, especially when a bedraggled and beaten racehorse shows up in her garden needing Etta’s love. you will meet rich, capricious owners, obsessive trainers, gallant stable lads and lasses and tough, brave jockeys; you will fall in love with the horses, and above all with Mrs Wilkinson herself – hilarious, heroic and gutsy, she will gallop into your heart forever. As usual though, the story romps along through highs and lows, with lots of relevant detail about the horse-racing world, plus some bonkers goings-on that only Jilly Cooper can pull off. Cooper usually creates characters whom the reader has great sympathy for no matter their behavior because Cooper gives her readers the complete back story.

I've given this review a bit of a harsh rating, but I just cannot get over how very disappointed I was from this latest offering to come out of the Cooper stable. From wild parties at Newbury and Ludlow, to an overnight of musical beds at Stratford, to the thrills and spills of the Cheltenham Gold Cup, one fling leads to another and another. A village syndicate is formed to put the filly into training, consisting of a riotous mix of local characters, who set off to the races in a minibus clanking with bottles.This was as enjoyable as any of her other books that I've read over the last 20 years with a few exceptions. Some of the hundreds of characters are one-dimensional, I disliked many of them (particularly the women) and Rafiq's character is a terrible cliche (almost insultingly so). Though superficially very funny, its humour barely concealed the seriousness of its intentions, which can be encapsulated in the single sentence: "Mummy says pardon is a much worse word than fuck. The plot worked very well for me, with such a cast of characters it needed to be involved enough to keep the reader interested without becoming over complicated. It seems, unfortunately, that a lot of her attitudes towards sex have not moved with the times and remain very old-fashioned.

For example, in The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous, we have the launch party, a kitchen visit, a school function, and a dinner party to impart information.The members' enclosure provides rich pickings for a canny observer and Cooper is brilliant at noticing the giveaway flourishes of the social climber, the displays of largesse and meanness that mark the gentleman from the bounder. you will meet rich, capricious owners, obsessive trainers, gallant stable lads and lasses and tough, brave jockeys; you will fall in love with the horses, and above all with Mrs Wilkinson herself - hilarious, heroic and gutsy, she will gallop into your heart forever. To read one of Cooper’s books is to escape into an alternative universe in which all is right with the world. Despite the ballooning cast lists and increasingly febrile plots, she remains adept at bringing these people to such glittering, thrusting life that they feel almost real.