My husband and I recently honeymooned in Italy. We both had terrible jet lag, so we needed a good show to watch while we were up in the middle of the night not sleeping. We found Rivals on Hulu and absolutely devoured it. We loved it so much that the wait until 2026 for season two seemed unbearable. So, of course, the obvious answer was to pick up the book.
With a massive cast of fascinating characters, Rivals explores Corinium, a Colchester television network, and the high-class social group that surrounds it. There is a great deal of drama, backstabbing, and a forbidden love story to tie it all together.
Lord Tony Baddingham is the ruthless head of the Corinium TV franchise, a position he is all but desperate to retain. So he hires Cameron Cook, an ambitious, cutthroat American executive who is as gorgeous as she is difficult, and Declan O’Hara, an Irish talk-show star to keep Corinium on top. But the two can’t stand each other, which creates endless problems.
Declan and his family’s arrival shakes up not only the network but the entire social scene. Then Declan’s new neighbor and Tony’s arch-nemesis, the handsome Rupert Campbell-Black, enters the fray. A rival group pitches for control of the franchise, and relationships crumble and rise, friendships falter, and no one is safe from the fallout.
Rivals was originally published in 1988 but was just published in America for the first time in 2024. It’s over seven hundred pages long, which was a shocking discovery in the beginning, but this book is incredibly detailed. No stone is left unturned, and there are many layers to explore in this story.
It takes a while to determine whose story this really is. This isn’t a straight up romance — it’s more a fiction about an entire social group and their relationships with a main romantic plot line weaving through.
A great deal of time is spent exploring character in this book, both backstories and motivations, in between plot moments. There are an enormous amount of main characters in this book, all of them utterly fascinating, and very few are even remotely concerned with fidelity in marriage which makes for a great deal of intrigue.
There is an omniscient third-person narrator, so the reader gets multiple character perspectives. The perspectives change seamlessly within the chapters, and the dialogue is written in different characters’ various vernaculars. It’s a choice that not only helps keep them all straight but also serves to further help build each character’s style and identity.
I love Dame Jilly Cooper’s writing style, although there is a great deal of exploration on the inner workings of politics of the Colchester television market in the 1980s that I didn’t fully understand and definitely contributed to the vast length. But the writing itself is infused with such humor and wit that even the drier bits are entertaining. It feels very British, although I am no expert in this.
There are lush descriptions of every setting the story encounters, and the events of the book span more than a year. This book is — without question — a slow burn. There is a great deal of elaborate setup, and some of the main characters aren’t introduced until a hundred or more pages in. This is not a fast-paced read. It’s one you must settle in with.
Rivals is not super spicy by today’s standards. It’s more focused on messy interpersonal dynamics, and I love its melodrama. The characters are definitely having sex and there are sex scenes, but they are brief and not overly interested in the graphic details, for the most part.
Like all the best love stories, at times while reading Rivals, one just wants to shout at the main characters and tell them to get their heads out of their asses and just be together. That said, there is a wonderful, cathartic, and satisfying ending that brings it all back together.
I can see the cast of the show in these characters, and Hulu did a wonderful job bringing this book faithfully to the screen. They perfectly captured the tone of this novel in a way that is a rare surprise for on-screen adaptations. I highly recommend both the book and the show to anyone looking for a story with lots of drama, a beautiful setting, and plenty of ostentatious characters to love and hate.
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