“Oh God, oh God, you’re too sexy! I’m not sure I can make it to the bedroom,” panted Harry Levin, his tongue licking Molly’s neck like a hungry wolf. They had only just burst in through the front door and already Harry’s hand had plunged down Molly’s halter-neck to grab at her...”

Gripping stuff, but not entirely appropriate for a family newspaper. Apologies then to fans of vintage Jackie Collins and Jilly Cooper who are gagging for a time when books were filled with insatiable über-millionaires on the prowl for premier-league sex and glamorous heroines with a real thirst for power. But their prayers are about to be answered. After decades of neglect, the bonkbuster is back. It’s bye-bye Bridget Jones and the misery of single life in a bedsit, and hello the champagne lifestyle of Russian oligarchs, supermodels and WAGs, set against the international backdrop of five-star hotels, yachts and private jets.

“It’s total escapism,” says Wayne Brookes, deputy publishing director at HarperCollins. “Britain was doing so well in the Nineties that you didn’t need it in your fiction. But the world is in such a bad place now, people are starting to want it again. It’s soap opera on a page. I have always been sent a lot of bonkbusters, but they were too old-fashioned, too outrageous and too stuck in the Eighties. Everyone thought the bonkbuster was dead.” Revived from the ashes, today’s high-heeled heroines are back with a vengeance, stopping at nothing to be in control – in bed and in the boardroom. Rather than marry the big shot, they want to call the shots. According to Auriol Bishop of Hodder: “They’re not about rags to riches. They usually start with powerful women who are flung into something new, up to another level.”

The sex has had a little nip and tuck, too; it’s a tool, as it were, for women in business – “He plunged his penis into her and the deal was sealed” – and it might be more explicit than you recall, with scenes of girl-on-girl action and three-in-a-bed romps. Today’s bonkbusters aren’t for the faint-hearted; nipples are under constant siege and the men are so energetic, as one author puts it, that sex is “like making love to a generator”.

One of the first authors to spark a bonkbuster goldrush was Katie Price, aka Jordan, the glamour model-turned-TV star, who, following the success of her autobiography, published Angel in 2006, then Crystal in 2007. Angel Unleashed, due out in July (published by Century), catches up with Angel, a glamour model-turned-WAG whose husband has been transferred to AC Milan.

Price’s rival, whose career is eerily similar, is Kerry Katona, one of Ebury’s big-name writers, who joined the girl group Atomic Kitten at 16 and went on to win I’m a Celebrity. Ebury was so thrilled with the 380,000 sales of her autobiography, Too Much, Too Young, that they asked her to do another book. Her debut bonkbuster, Tough Love, which she produced with a ghostwriter, sold 100,000 copies; six months on, her second, The Footballer’s Wife, is due out next month; her third, Model Girlfriend, in October. Not bad for someone who is dyslexic and whose preferred reading matter is OK! magazine. Another celebrity-turned-author is Coleen McLoughlin, who signed a five-book fiction deal after the success of her autobiography.

The spectrum of bonkbuster writers is as varied as the bedroom antics they describe. Many of the new generation are Oxbridge graduates, albeit with a taste for Sydney Sheldon and heat magazine. Cambridge grad Tilly Bagshawe, a former headhunter, was 29 and had an 11-year-old daughter when she started writing, having earned enough money in the City to have a bash at her first novel, Adored (published in 2005). On looks alone, Bagshawe could pass as one of her glossy heroines. Slim, with long, shiny hair and a smooth tan, she has houses in LA and London, and is even married to an American millionaire. Do Not Disturb, published by Orion in February, is her third novel; set in the Hamptons, it is packed with sex, sweeping plot lines and high drama. “They’re quite violent,” she says. “It’s not all Mills & Boon sex. After a while sex scenes can get a bit similar; I have to guard against that.” Her sister, the novelist and prospective Tory candidate Louise Bagshawe, had already written seven books by the time Tilly started.

When Bagshawe wrote her first book, publishers were still focused on finding the next Bridget Jones (published 1997). “I love Bridget Jones, but that was never me,” she says. “I thought there was a gap for the classic strong heroine, as opposed to the slightly ditzy, overweight heroine whom readers empathise with. My heroines aren’t like my readers; they’re a fantasy projection.” Unlike most of her contemporaries who work from home, Bagshawe, now a mother of three, has a desk at a writers’ studio. “Modern bonkbuster heroines are less caricature and more developed as women,” she says. “Although they’re all strong, they do have sensitivities and weak points. What chick lit has done is make women readers much more interested in the inner life, and there must be something that people can identify with in the inner life even if the outer life is super-high glamour.”

Author Jo Rees wasn’t prepared for the frenzy that followed the completion of her first bonkbuster, Platinum, to be released by Bantam Press in May, which sent publishers into a bidding war. With a woman in a backless dress pressed against a man in a tux holding a glass of champagne, you know from the cover that it’s stronger stuff than chick lit. Previously published as Josie Lloyd, Rees has written several bestselling romantic comedies (including Come Together, The Seven Year Itch and The Three Day Rule) with her husband Emlyn Rees, but had always wanted to write a bonkbuster since reading Shirley Conran’s Lace at school. “I felt it was time for a modern update,” she says.

In one of her books she would be described as a dyed blonde, with sparkling eyes and a bubbly, engaging manner. While talking to her, her sharp eye always seems to be scanning the room for a tasty vignette. Helped by insights from friends in the banking industry, yachting captains and party planners, Platinum took her a year to write. “I loved every minute of it,” she says. She had her third child and moved to Brighton at the same time. “I was writing the sex scenes surrounded by packing boxes, wearing trousers with an elasticated waist. There are only a handful in the book but you can’t chicken out; they need to be risky. They need to be passed around the playground.”

One of Rees’s rivals, Tasmina “Tammy” Perry, prefers to write her sex scenes in the dark, “so I can disconnect from everything”. Gold Diggers, published by HarperCollins, due out in paperback in April, is her second bonkbuster after Daddy’s Girls, which sold around 150,000 copies. She abandoned her career as a lawyer after winning a writing competition in More magazine, where she was made editor within two years. She has also worked at lads’ magazine Loaded – where she was the only woman, and ended up marrying its editor at the time, John Perry – and was deputy editor of InStyle magazine. She had always wanted to be an author after being taken, aged 14, by her mother to hear Barbara Taylor Bradford talk at Waterstone’s in Manchester. “I remember her talking in this cloud of bespoke scent and thinking, she’s got the best job in the world.”

Perry was on her honeymoon to St Martin in 2004 when she spotted a gap in the market that would lead to her full-time career. “I was in the airport lounge at Heathrow, wanting something big and juicy for the sun lounger and looking in the commercial women’s fiction section. I’d read everything that Jackie Collins and Jilly Cooper had to offer. Everything else at the lighter-weight end was misery memoirs and chick lit. I just thought, this really isn’t what I wanted. I wanted Valley of the Dolls, Lace: the sort of books that seemed to be out of vogue.” She started sketching out a storyline from her hammock and put London at the core of her book. “Storytelling is key,” she says. “I don’t think you can write 160,000 words on sex and shopping.”

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