Author:Jilly Cooper

The most fun you can have under a Tenor...
Abigail Rosen, nicknamed Appassionata, was the sexiest, most flamboyant violinist in classical music, but she was also the loneliest and the most exploited girl in the world. When a dramatic suicide attempt destroyed her violin career, she set her sights on the male-dominated heights of the conductor's rostrum.
Given the chance to take over the Rutminster Symphony Orchestra, Abby is ecstatic, not realising the RSO is in hock up to its neck and is composed of the wildest bunch of musicians ever to blow a horn or caress a fiddle. Abby finds it increasingly difficult to control her undisciplined rabble and pretend she is not madly attracted to the fatally glamorous horn player, Viking O'Neill, who claims droit de seigneur over every pretty woman joining the orchestra. And then Rannaldini, arch-fiend and international maestro, rolls up with Machiavellian plans of his own to sabotage the RSO.
Effervescent as champagne, Jilly Cooper's novel brings back old favourites like Rupert and Taggie Campbell-Black, but also ends triumphantly with a rampageous orchestral tour of Spain and the high drama of an international piano competition.
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Praise for Appassionata:
'Delicious ... I could not put the damned thing down' Sunday Express
'A boisterous tale of sex and Chopin' Tatler
'Sexy, dazzling protagonists... the humour comes thick and fast' Daily Express
Appassionata - the divine Jilly Cooper's latest and greatest novel
—— The Sunday TimesTriumphant... a boisterous tale of sex and Chopin amongst Rutshire folk
—— TatlerSexy, dazzling protagonists... the humour comes thick and fast
—— Daily ExpressDelicious: light as a souffle and with divine flashes of wit. I could not put the damned thing down
—— Sunday ExpressA magnificent novel of ideas, a disquisition on the fallout of the death of ideology
—— ObserverRoth explores our expedients and tragedies with a masterly, often unnerving, blend of tenderness, harshness, insight and wit...a gripping novel
—— New York Times Book ReviewRoth remains as edgy, as furious, as funny, and as dangerous as he was forty years ago
—— New York Review of BooksI Married a Communist proves that, following the success of Sabbath's Theater and American Pastoral, he remains on extraordinary form... Wonderful storytelling and characterisation
—— Guardian, Books of the YearThe McCarthy era has faded, eerily, into nostalgia, just as Capitol Hill produces its own 90s version of witch-hunt and communal obsession with enemies of the state, and perversions of justice perpetrated in democracy's name. Roth avoids nostalgia by making his narrator an active, if unwitting participant in the original drama, caught up in political currents and counter-currents he did not comprehend at the time
—— Lisa JardineRoth’s conflicted, many-layered characters give this work memorable force
—— Guardian