Describing herself as upper middle class, Jilly Cooper claims that snobbery is alive and kicking Meet her characters - Mr and Mrs Nouveau-Richards, Harry Stow-Crat and Jen Teale, and observe thair everyday pretensions - their courtships, furnishings, clothes, food and careers.

Janna Curtis, the dynamic new head of Larks (Larkminster Comprehensive), has been drafted in to save what is a fast-sinking school from closure. Janna is young, pretty, enthusiastic and vastly brave - and she will do anything to rescue her demoralised, run-down and cash-strapped school.

There was no doubt Bella Parkinson was a success: the most promising actress in London, bright, sexy - and hopelessly scatterbrained - she was taking the town by storm. Rupert Henriques, dashingly handsome and wealthy enough to buy her every theatre in London if she wanted it, couldn't wait to marry her... come into her life again... Rupert's sinister cousin Lazlo, for some reason of his own, was trying to prevent her marriage. Before she knew where she was, Bella found herself in real danger...

Shy, dreamy, and incurably romantic, Harriet Poole was shattered when her brief affair with Simon Villiers, Oxford's leading playboy undergraduate, ended abruptly, leaving her penniless, alone and pregnant. Still hopelessly in love with Simon, she took baby William and buried herself in deepest Yorkshire as nanny to the children of Cory Erskine, a somewhat eccentric scriptwriter. to arrive to disrupt Harriet's peaceful routine: first Cory's estranged wife Noel, hellbent on winning Cory back, then Cory's glamorous brother Kit, whose old affair with Noel didn't stop him making passes at...

As soon as Octavia caught a glimpse of Jeremy in the nightclub, she knew she just had to have him. It didn't matter that he'd just got engaged to an old school friend of hers, plump, good natured Gussie; he was looking at Octavia in the way that suggested bed rather than breakfast, and she was weak at the knees...But Octavia was used to men falling in love with her at a moment's notice - it happened all the time if you were as rich and as stunning as she was. An invitation to join Gussie and Jeremy for a cozy weekend on a canal barge came like a gift from the gods. How could she fail to hook...

As a librarian, Imogen read a lot of books, but none of them covered real life on the Riviera. Her holiday with tennis ace, Nicky, and the whole glamorous coterie of journalist, playboy, photographer, was a revelation - and so was she. A prize worth winning. A wild Yorkshire rose among the thorny model girls, Cable and Yvonne, with a rare asset that they'd mislaid years ago...But the path of a jet-set virgin in that lovely wicked world was a hard one. Imogen began to wonder if virtue really was its own reward...

The trouble with the Mulholland family, Prudence decided, was that they were all in love with the wrong people. She'd been overjoyed when Pendle, her super-cool barrister boyfriend, invited her home for the weekend to meet his family. At least she might get some reaction out of him - so far he hadn't so much as made a pass at her, after the first night when he'd nearly raped her. But home turned out to be a decaying mansion in the Lake District, and family were his glamorous, scatty mother who forgot the mounting bills by throwing wild parties, and brothers, Ace, dark and forbidding, and...

Ricky France-Lynch is moody, macho, and magnificent. He had a large crumbling estate, a nine-goal polo handicap, and a beautiful wife who was fair game for anyone with a cheque book. He also had the adoration of fourteen-year-old Perdita MacLeod. Perdita couldn't wait to leave her dreary school and become a polo player.

Sir Robert Rannaldini had two ambitions: to seduce his stepdaughter Tabitha Campbell-Black, and to put his mark on musical history by making the film of Verdi's opera, Don Carlos. As the crew gather at Rannaldini's haunted abbey for filming, it is inevitable that violent feuds, temperamental screaming, and devious plotting will ensue.

Set against the glorious Cotswold countryside and the playgrounds of the world, Jilly Cooper's 'Rutshire Chronicles' offer an intoxicating blend of skulduggery, swooning, romance, sexual adventure and hilarious high jinks.