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

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But while there is much to celebrate in Cooper's portrayals of sex, it wasn't always fun – or consensual. "There are rapes that happen in Jilly's books, and it is very rare that the rapist has any kind of comeuppance," says Burge. In one particularly disturbing scene in Riders, Rupert coerces his wife Helen into a sexual act. "It's a really horrible scene," says Burge. "Those aspects are difficult to read now." 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 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

Being loved and a job where people say “well done!”. It’s terribly trivial but it matters. I’ve always said the secret to a happy marriage is creaking bed springs – from laughter, rather than sex. I spoke to my lovely former neighbour Tony Adams a lot and also players at my local club, Forest Green Rovers. Then a new manager arrived and got rid of all my friends. It’s such a ruthless sport but that makes for good fiction. I get lovely letters from teenagers saying they read Riders underneath the bed coversEverybody tells me it ought to be but I’m going to write one about Sparta. It was the only place in ancient Greece where adultery was allowed. It was punished everywhere else but not in Sparta with all these macho men. It gave me an idea for people going on holiday to Sparta to recreate it. I want to write about the sexes sorting themselves out because they’re in an awful muddle now. Rupert dislikes football and his first impressions of Searston are distinctly unfavourable. But as their new and indelibly competitive Chairman, he won’t stand for anything less than an Everest climb to the top of the Premier League. If the pressure is on for her books to be full of filth, it may be because she is the last bastion of the genre as we know it. Collins died in 2015, Krantz in 2019, and Conran hasn't published a novel since the 1990s. Cooper has said she has an idea for one more book after this, set in Sparta, the only place in ancient Greece where adultery was allowed. But will her last novel signal the death of the bonkbuster? Yes. She’s old and grey now, like me. Her type comes up rather grey but I’ve written every book since Riders on her. She’s a star, is my Monica.

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. It sounds puritanical. Why feel guilty about pleasure? But I get lovely letters from teenagers saying they read Riders underneath the bed covers. It’s wonderful to give people guilty pleasures in that way. The novel features a gay relationship between a player and manager. How do you feel about homosexuality still being taboo in football? Valent Edwards says “bluddy” because he is from Yorkshire, but how else would you pronounce “bloody”? He also says “fooking”, but what accent is that? Paris Alvaston, trying to teach public schoolboy wannabe footballers how to talk common (because “footballers resent public schoolboys”), advises that they start saying “pass” to rhyme with “gas”, by which I guess one infers that the working classes of the home counties also have to adjust their accents to play football because they are only allowed to come from Leicester. Treadwell-Collins said Cooper’s “iconic novels’ razor-sharp observations on class, sex, love and what it means to be British resonate even more today than when Jilly wrote them in the 1980s”.Sunak described your books as a guilty pleasure. Do you agree with the concept of guilty pleasures? Keeping it fun. Make the people glamorous and create an atmosphere of excitement. You have to imagine you’re having it with somebody. I had a heavenly husband [publisher Leo Cooper] who died 10 years ago and he was wonderful at sex. So I used to just imagine what we’d been up to. Conran's classic Lace (featuring an infamous goldfish scene) was especially explicit about women's right to sexual pleasure. "There's a character who has never had an orgasm before and then she has a male partner who basically says: 'you have as much right to an orgasm as anyone else'," says Burge. "They talk about it and communicate in a very modern way for a book published in 1982."