Is there still Sex in the City at 60? You bet! Candace Bushnell is back with ...

It helped define a generation with its hilarious yet searingly honest account of thirtysomething Carrie Bradshaw's quest to find love. 

Sex And The City introduced millions of viewers to Jimmy Choo stilettos, Cosmopolitan cocktails and, of course, Mr Big, Carrie's handsome but decidedly on-off love interest. 

Now, more than 20 years after Sex And The City first hit our screens, its author Candace Bushnell is back with a hotly anticipated new book. A TV series is already being planned.

However, if diehard fans are hoping to see the return of Carrie and her gang, they are in for a surprise. For while the original show featured endless romantic entanglements and 'major dreamboats', the new book depicts a radically different world – of post-divorce dating, Botox, young 'cubs' attracted to older women, and bizarre therapies.

Candace, now 60, has married and divorced since writing her 1997 classic. 

She says she now wants to address women who find themselves seeking passion – not to mention the secret of eternal youth – at an age when once their mothers and grandmothers were easing comfortably into wrinkles and retirement.

Explaining that the new book – Is There Still Sex In The City? – is in her own voice and unashamedly autobiographical, Candace says: 'At one time, fiftysomething meant the beginning of retirement, working less, spending more time on your hobbies, and sliding into a more leisurely lifestyle.

'Retirement-age folks weren't meant to do much of anything but get older and a bit heavier. They weren't expected to exercise, start business ventures, have casual sex with strangers and start over again.

'But this is exactly what the lives of a lot of fifty- and sixtysomething women look like today.'

Candace says writing the book was a 'no-brainer'. She started it two years ago after a series of events turned her world upside-down. Her mother died of breast cancer and her ten-year marriage to ballet dancer Charles Askegard fell apart (in divorce papers she alleged he cheated on her).

She had an enviable lifestyle, splitting her time between a £2.1 million flat on New York's Upper East Side and a £3.5 million 18th Century farmhouse in The Hamptons, the super-rich enclave a three-hour drive from New York.

Yet Candace, who had once partied until dawn and was wooed by a series of wealthy suitors including Vogue publisher Ron Galotti – the inspiration for Mr Big – found herself alone.

'The topic of sex, once the source of so much amusement, embarrassment, fear and joy, rarely came up,' she says. 

'My single friends had been single for ever and not dating and therefore not getting any [sex], while my married friends were married and dealing with kids and also, I imagined, not getting any.

'The thirties are about establishing yourself, your career; the forties are when you're pushing forward, making money, about how the world sees you and how you see yourself. I wanted to look at this later stage in life, a time when women can focus on themselves.

'I saw it with me and my friends. It's a time of real upheaval. Getting older for women is nature's way of saying it's your time, your creative time. You can't rely on romantic tropes.'

No wonder the new book has already struck a chord – with programme makers at least.

It has been snapped up by Paramount Studios for a reported £15 million TV series, and filming will begin later this year.

However, there will be no return for Carrie or her friends – man-eating Samantha, sweet Charlotte or whip-smart lawyer Miranda. Instead, proposed new characters called Queenie, Tilda Tia, Sassy and Marilyn have set off a feeding frenzy in Hollywood, where glamorous roles for mature women are in short supply.