If you thought you knew what to expect of Jilly Cooper - bursts of restless romance, strings of domestic disasters, flip fun with the class system - 'Riders'' will come as a pleasurable surprise.
A multi-stranded love story, it tells of the lives of a tight circle of star riders who move from show to show, united by raging ambition, bitter rivalry and the terror of failure. The super-heroes are Jake Lovell, a half-gipsy orphan who wears gold earrings, handles a horse - or a woman - with effortless skill, and is consumed with hatred for the promiscuous upper-class cad, Rupert Campbell-Black, who has no intention of being faithful to his wife, Helen, but is outraged when she runs away with another rider.
Set in the tense, heroic world of show-jumping, Jilly Cooper's novel moves from home-county gymkhanas through a riot of horsey events all over the world, culminating in the high dramas of the Los Angeles Olympics.
