Following the sad passing of Jilly Cooper earlier this week, several of our readers have written in to express their sadness and respect for one of our most revered authors. Here’s some of their views.
Jo, Leicester
Jilly Cooper was the author who made mischief not just respectable, but marketable. For those of us writing from the provinces (or what we affectionately call “the creative heartlands”) she proved that great literature doesn’t have to live in Bloomsbury to matter. Her unforgettable characters (as vain, hopeful and gloriously human as the rest of us) remind us that laughter is the truest national therapy. In many ways, Jilly paved the way for today’s new wave of regional voices, the very voices Nick Owen Publishing is proud to champion. Her laughter lives on, not only in her books but in every author who dares to write with spirit (such as me).
Mike, Doncaster
There was always a copy of Riders somewhere in our house; sometimes on the coffee table, sometimes in the bath, sometimes on a sun-lounger during family holidays. Jilly Cooper gave readers of every demographic permission to be glorious, ambitious, and kind all at once. She helped women feel seen, even when they were, shall we say, between beauty appointments. Her characters felt like friends: glamorous yet relatable, witty yet warm: the perfect companions for readers navigating real-world romance and responsibility. Jilly’s readership, like ours, spans class and culture from the salons of Surrey to the semis of Speke.
David, Oxford
In her own subversively effervescent manner, Jilly Cooper became an unintentional sociologist of late-twentieth-century Britain: the Austen of aspiration, the anthropologist of charm if you will. Beneath the effervescence, she mapped the moral cartography of ambition and embarrassment with surgical accuracy. Her prose, deceptively effulgent, achieved what few writers dare: a fusion of populism and precision. As someone who once wrote an MA thesis on postmodern irony, I find her linguistic elasticity thrilling with her ability to oscillate between farce and truth, between satire and sympathy. To laugh with Jilly was to recognise one’s own absurdity and to forgive it.
Rez, London
I’ll admit it: I picked up Rivals because my wife left it in the car. I meant to take the piss, but then I couldn’t stop reading. There was something familiar about it all: the Shed rivalries, the camaraderie, the small-town loyalties. Swap polo for darts and you’ve got half the wonderful community who make up our loyal northern readership. Jilly wrote people like they were already alive , proof that storytelling travels faster than gossip (and yes, we ship free over £10). She made joy look like hard work and that’s the kind of art I respect
Liz, Brighton
The air on the Sussex coast felt momentarily less mischievous though that may have been the sea fog. Jilly Cooper’s sparkle lingers in the laughter that escapes when you shouldn’t, in the pages that shimmer with courage disguised as comedy. Her books remain a reminder that warmth, wit, and good storytelling never go out of fashion, much like the enduring glow of Nick Owen Publishing’s backlist titles. Jilly taught us that joy is its own legacy, one that lives on, from Seaford to the shelves of every reader with heart.
Compiled with professional affection by Julian Pilkington-Sterne
Marketing Executive | Nick Owen Publishing
“Consistency is the new creativity.”
We’ll be reflecting on the work of Jilly Cooper through the following week so if you’d like to contribute to the debate, please just drop us a line or two!
The Courting Lives of an Ageing Tennis Player
“Tennis belongs to the individualistic past – a hero, or at most a pair of friends or lovers, against the world.” (Jacques Barzun)
What happens after you believe you’ve won Wimbledon, conquered your local tennis club, and crowned yourself a sporting legend — when none of it was quite true?
The Courting Lives of an Ageing Tennis Player picks up where Confessions left off: with Lord Andrew John Paul George Ringo Murray of Kirkintilloch rescued from a burning raft of tennis rackets, arrested, and facing the small inconvenience of reality. Undeterred, our gloriously unreliable narrator sets his sights on an even greater prize — the Australian Open — while simultaneously navigating the far more dangerous terrain of love, obsession, correspondence, and self-delusion.
Told through a wildly inventive mix of match reports, fan mail, court transcripts, newspaper cuttings, ornithological “sightings,” and illustrated interludes, this is a novel that treats tennis as theatre, romance as combat, and ageing as an extreme sport. Along the way, real-world tennis mythology collides with fantasy, bureaucracy, and pataphysical logic, as Andy encounters rival “GOATs,” prison systems, phantom coaches, and women who may — or may not — be in love with him.
By turns absurd, tender, infuriating, and unexpectedly moving, The Courting Lives of an Ageing Tennis Player is a comic novel about the stories we tell ourselves to survive the fine line between confidence and delusion masculinity, ageing, and desire under pressure and the strange ways love refuses to follow the rules
Illustrated throughout by Paul Warren, this sequel deepens the world of Confessions while standing confidently on its own as a bold, original, laugh-out-loud meditation on ambition, attachment, and the enduring hope that the next match — or the next letter — might finally change everything.
Next stop: Melbourne. Love all.
