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Harriet
Harriet
Jan 2, 2026 11:28 PM

Author:Jilly Cooper

Harriet

The light-hearted, hilarious and gorgeous novel centring on the trials of the bashful but beautiful Harriet. Find out why Jilly Cooper is one of Britain most beloved authors...

'No one else can make me laugh and cry quite like Jilly Cooper.' - GILL SIMS

'The funniest and sharpest writer there is.' - JENNY COLGAN

'The Jane Austen of our time' - HARPERS

Further praise for Jilly Cooper:

'Joyful and mischievous' Jojo Moyes

'Fun, sexy and unputdownable' Marian Keyes

'Flawlessly entertaining' Helen Fielding

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Shy, dreamy, and incurably romantic, Harriet Poole was shattered when her brief affair with Simon Villiers, the dashing Oxford 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.

Local tongues were just beginning to wag when a whole host of visitors began 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 Harriet.

Finally, of all people, Simon...

Reviews

The Jane Austen of our time

—— Harpers and Queen

Roth invents baseball anew, as pure slapstick... An awesome performance

—— New Republic

Roth is one of a handful of living American novelists who can be called great

—— Washington Post

Roth is better than he's ever been before... The prose is electric

—— Atlantic

A magnificent novel of ideas, a disquisition on the fallout of the death of ideology

—— Observer

Roth explores our expedients and tragedies with a masterly, often unnerving, blend of tenderness, harshness, insight and wit...a gripping novel

—— New York Times Book Review

Roth remains as edgy, as furious, as funny, and as dangerous as he was forty years ago

—— New York Review of Books

I 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 Year

The 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 Jardine

Roth’s conflicted, many-layered characters give this work memorable force

—— Guardian
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