Wicked!

Britain’s number one bestselling author turns her brilliant pen to the explosive world of education.

Two schools, both in leafy Larkminster, but worlds apart, are turned upside down when the ambitious and fatally attractive headmaster of fashionable Bagley Hall, Hengist Brett-Taylor, hatches a plan to share the highly superior facilities of his school with the students at Larkminster Comprehensive. His reasons for doing so are purely financial but he is also encouraged by the opportunities the scheme gives him for frequent meetings with Janna Curtis, the young, pretty and enthusiastic new principal of the comprehensive school. The determined Janna has been drafted in to save what is a fast-sinking school from closure, and she will do anything to rescue her run-down, demoralized and cash-strapped school.

The parents of Bagley Hall’s rich and pampered children are none too keen on this radical move, but the students see it as a great opportunity to get up to even more mayhem than usual. And for the pupils at the comprehensive school, many of them struggling with appalling home backgrounds, violence and lack of any parental support (problems which are not unknown to some of the Bagley Hall pupils) mixing with the posh school up the road is often a mixed blessing.

Jilly Cooper is a well-known journalist, writer and media superstar, and is the author of many number one bestselling novels, including Riders, Rivals, Polo, The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous, Appassionata, Score! and Pandora. Jilly and her husband live in Gloucestershire. She was appointed OBE for services to literature in the 2004 Queen’s Birthday Honours List.