Welcome To Signed Books For You

How To Stay Married by Jilly Cooper (hardback)

Jump! A guide to how to stay married written in 1969 by the irrepressible Jilly Cooper. Reissued to coincide with the golden wedding anniversary of Jilly and Leo Cooper, with a new introduction by Jilly.

When Jilly Cooper, then a young Sunday Times journalist, was asked to write a book on marriage, she had been married to Leo Cooper for a mere seven years. Now they are celebrating their Golden Wedding, and although the institution of marriage has changed a great deal since this book was first written, much of Jilly's advice – frank, fearless, often hilarious, but always wise – still holds good. From the wedding and the honeymoon to life afterwards, including how to deal with the in-laws and how to tell if you spouse is having an affair, she dispenses anecdotes, jokes, common sense and endless optimism and fun.

£20.00 - including personal signed message from the author and free delivery in the UK.

Jump! by Jilly Cooper (paperback)

Jump! Etta Bancroft - sweet, kind, beautiful - adores racing and harbours a crush on one of its stars, the handsome high-handed owner-trainer Rupert Campbell-Black. When her bullying husband dies, Etta's selfish children drag her from her lovely Dorset house to live in a hideous modern bungalow in the Cotswold village of Willowwood .

One night Etta finds a horribly mutilated filly in the snow in the nearby woods. Miraculously she recovers and, by now called Mrs Wilkinson, captivates everyone in the village. DNA tests reveal her to be a spectacularly well-bred racehorse. Etta forms a village syndicate to put the filly into training, and Mrs Wilkinson becomes a star, ridden by Rupert s delectable god-daughter Amber. Then Mrs Wilkinson is entered for the Grand National. Can she be the first mare in more than fifty years, and Amber the first woman ever, to conquer this mighty race?

In Jump! we meet rich capricious owners, obsessive trainers and gallant stable lads and lasses; tough, jockeys, brave horses, and above all Mrs Wilkinson herself - hilarious , heroic and so gutsy she will gallop into our hearts forever.

£15.00 - including personal signed message from the author and free delivery in the UK.

Jump! by Jilly Cooper (hardback)

£45.00 - including personal signed message from the author and free delivery in the UK.

Wicked! by Jilly Cooper (paperback)

At Bagley Hall, a notoriously wild, but increasingly academic, independent, crammed with the children of the famous, trouble is afoot. The ambitious and fatally attractive headmaster, Hengist Brett-Taylor, hatches a plan to share the facilities of his school with Larkminster Comprehensive - known locally, as 'Larks'. His reasons for doing so are purely financial, but he is encouraged by the opportunities the scheme gives him for frequent meetings with Janna Curtis, the dynamic new head of Larks, who 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 demoralized, run-down and cash-strapped school. Neither parents nor staff of either school, are too keen on this radical move, although some can see the possible financial advantages. For the students, however, it offers great opportunities to get up to even more mayhem than usual.

£25.00 - including personal signed message from the author and free delivery in the UK.

How To Survive Christmas by Jilly Cooper (hardback)

Has the Christmas fixtures row already started - but it's still only August? How are you going to cope with Granny's peke this year? Will your mother-in-law present you with yet another hideous jumper? And how will you survive without seeing the object of your unrequited desires for at least ten days?

Jilly Cooper has the answer to everything. Whether you should seek refuge in the cooking sherry, or suggest a wholesome family hike, Jilly offers, in her own irrepressible style, sound and often hilarious advice to us all about how to get through the roller-coaster ride we call Christmas.

She also introduces us to her perfect Christmas family: Scarlett O'Aga, an Xmasochist house-wife, her wayward husband Noel, his seductive mistress, Ms Stress, their four delightful children, Holly, Robin, Carol and Nicholas, and their dog Difficult Patch, and gives us a poignant and wholly recognizable view of how they manage to celebrate Christmas.

Whether you love Christmas or loathe it this is the ideal book for you. Jilly has captured the essence of the season's inevitable conflicts in her wildly irreverent account of the assault course most of us run each year from October to January.

£30.00 - including personal signed message from the author and free delivery in the UK.

Pandora by Jilly Cooper (paperback)

No picture ever came more beautiful than Raphael’s Pandora. Discovered by a dashing young lieutenant, Raymond Belvedon, in a Normandy Chateau in 1944, she had cast her spell over his family – all artists and dealers – for fifty years. Hanging in a turret of their lovely Cotswold house, Pandora witnessed Raymond’s tempestuous wife Galena both entertaining a string of lovers, and giving birth to her four children: Jupiter, Alizarin, Jonathan and superbrat Sienna. Then an exquisite stranger rolls up, claiming to be a long-lost daughter of the family, setting the three Belvedon brothers at each other’s throats. Accompanying her is her fatally glamorous boyfriend, whose very different agenda includes an unhealthy interest in the Raphael.

During a fireworks party, the painting is stolen. The hunt to retrieve it takes the reader on a thrilling journey to Vienna, Geneva, Paris, New York and London. After a nail-biting court case and a record-smashing Old Masters sale at Sotheby’s, passionate love triumphs and Pandora is restored to her rightful home.

The Sunday Times - ‘Triumphantly good’

£25.00 - including personal signed message from the author and free delivery in the UK.

Animals in War by Jilly Cooper (paperback)

Pigeons carrying vital messages to and from the beleaguered city during the Siege of Paris; horses and mules struggling through miles of fetid mud to bring ammunition to the front in the Great War; dogs sniffing out mines for the British invasion force in the Second World War – countless brave animals have played their part in the long, cruel history of war. Some have won medals for gallantry - like G.I. Joe, the American pigeon who saved 100 British lives in Italy, and Rob, the black and white mongrel who made over twenty parachute jumps with the SAS. Too many others have died abandoned, in agony and alone, after serving their country with distinction.

Jilly Cooper has here written a tribute to the role of animals in wartime. It is a tragic and horrifying story - yet it has its lighter moments too: a hilarious game of musical chairs played on camels during the Desert Campaign; and the budgie who remarked, when carried from a bombed-out East End tenement, ‘This is my night out’.

Re-published to coincide with the launch of The Animals in War Memorial Fund, this is a vivid and unforgettable record of man’s inhumanity to animals, but also an astonishing story of courage, intelligence, devotion and resilience.

£25.00 - including personal signed message from the author and free delivery in the UK.