Tackle!: Let the sabotage and scandals begin in the new instant Sunday Times bestseller

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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 Truth be told, he has been having a tantrum since he washed the vaginal deodorant out of Helen’s privates in 1985. He is always sleeping badly, and sustaining injuries, and pretending they don’t hurt, and crusading to victory (polo) with a dislocated shoulder, and covering his pain with stoicism and more tantrums. In Cooper’s telling,this is incredibly hot and he is exactly the kind of man you want in your corner (and four-poster bed). His daughter persuades him to buy a failing local football team, so that he can sign up her star striker boyfriend. Rupert is not a football fan, but his competitive streak means he immediately sets about getting them to the top of the Premier League, on the way dealing with a corrupt rival team and, inevitably, a group of Wags lusting after him. Jilly Cooper was made a CBE in 2018 (Photo: John Stillwell/Getty)

With the help of the club’s ravishing and adorable secretary, Tember West, and his sassy Press Officer, Dora Belvedon, he becomes increasingly fond of his riotous mix of players, despite bawling them out whenever they face defeat.The 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. 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 Pooley 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

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 Buchanan There's still something infectiously joyful and funny about [Cooper's] particular brand of very English writing The Observer