Riders (novel)

Riders is a 1985 novel written by the English author Jilly Cooper. It is the first of a series of bonkbusters known as the Rutshire Chronicles, which are set in the fictional English county of Rutshire. The story focuses on the lives of a group of top show jumping stars and follows the ups and downs of both their personal and professional lives. The plot focuses on the lives of rival equestrians Rupert Campbell-Black and Jake Lovell, who first met at boarding school and subsequently compete against each other in the show-jumping ring. Their wives also feature heavily in the book: Lovell marries a wealthy debutante, Tory Maxwell, for her money; Campbell-Black marries an American book editor, Helen Macaulay. Both are unfaithful to their wives, with Lovell having an affair with Macaulay. The book's climax is set at the Los Angeles Olympics, where the British team win a gold medal, despite riding one man down and one man injured. Cooper lost her first draft of the novel circa 1970, after she accidentally left it on a bus in London. She later commented that she felt the book was better as a result, since the characters had much longer to mature. The book was reviewed positively upon publication with writer Anne de Courcy describing the work as progression in terms of Cooper's fiction writing, shifting gear from her previous romantic novels such as Bella. The novel sold over 1 million copies and was cited by former prime minister Rishi Sunak as one of his favourite books. After Cooper's death in 2025, her publisher Ian Scott-Kerr described how Riders had "changed the course of popular fiction forever". The novel was adapted in 1993 into a television film for Anglia Television and broadcast on the ITV Network. Riders was directed by Gabrielle Beaumont...