It’s hard work having fun: Wives Like Us, by Plum Sykes, reviewed

Just when you thought the Cotswolds must have peaked as a fictional setting, a new rom-com from the author of Bergdorf Blondes floats like cherry blossom onto a chalk stream. Plum Sykes has chosen a rich (as in minted) target, and she is well-equipped to take aim. As a former contributing editor of American Vogue, she might be considered part of the trans-atlantic glossy posse, but at heart she’s still an Oxford-educated Sykes – with a certain diplomatic heritage. The family seat is the magnificent Sledmere in Yorkshire, which has its own blue-tiled Turkish Room. So Plum is not your common-or-garden mag hag. But she now lives in the ’wolds, and when it comes to the lifestyles of the UHNWs (ultra-high-net-worths) of Poshtershire, she knows. And she certainly can write.

The setting of Wives Like Us is ‘the country’ (which is how people like Sykes refer to anywhere outside London), and although sex and horses feature, we are far from Jilly Cooper’s Rutshire. This is an unabashedly high-end, high-spend scenario in which helicopters are Ubers, Daylesford is a corner shop and Estelle Manor a canteen. There is ruthless competition over houses, horses, staff, outfits, children and more, until the reader longs for someone to admit how joyless the extravagant lifestyle of country princesses is – but nobody does. That’s because it’s all for Instagram. It’s life as a social media spectacular, all stiffies for ‘kitchen sups’ and tablescapes at dawn. Every night there’s a £500-a-head ‘impromptu’ birthday dinner. By day there’s a Ladies’ Hack, with wives riding out in designer equestrian onesies to a pitstop at a Marie Antoinette-style hameau where uniformed staff serve sloe gin cocktails and drones film it overhead.