MOVE over Mr Big, women want the big time for themselves. Candace Bushnell, the author of Sex and the City, one of the defining books of a generation, has declared that “success is the new sex”.

Her new novel, Lipstick Jungle, published last week, has as many battle scenes in the boardroom as in the bedroom. “I noticed the women I know had stopped talking about sex and relationships so much and the young women are really talking about their careers,” Bushnell said. Being successful was part of “their secret dreams”.

In place of the Sex and the City quartet of single women searching for love and sex in New York is a trio of glamorous “power babes”, who may occasionally help themselves to a male model but are not obsessed by men.

“Sex in a book has to be used judiciously,” said Bushnell, 46. “When you are in your twenties and thirties, yes, you spend a lot of time thinking about it but, as people get older, other things are more important.”

Victory Ford, an inspirational fashion director in the book, is tempted to have a money- spinning collection of her own. Why shouldn’t a woman be as rich as a man, she wonders? Wendy Healy, the president of a film company, is eager to add an Oscar to her mantelpiece; and Nico O’Neilly, the cool, controlling editor of a fashion magazine, has ambitions to run the entire media company. Both are married, none too happily, with children.

A reviewer for The Wall Street Journal commented that “calculating, arrogant females are not more likable than calculating, arrogant men”, but after the huge success of Sex and the City on television, Lipstick Jungle is also likely to be made into a TV series.

“Nothing has been finalised yet but hopefully it will be in the next couple of weeks,” Bushnell said. “In a way, these are the women I was writing about in Sex and the City 10 years later. They’re more grown-up, more established. They’ve found their ways. You don’t really start to figure things out until you’re in your forties.”

The writer got married at the age of 43 to Charles Askegard, a dancer with the New York City Ballet, who swept her off her feet in a whirlwind seven-week romance.

Bushnell, who is as slim and fashion-conscious as Barbie, had found a real-life Ken: Askegard served as the model for the ballet-dancing male lead in the bestselling Barbie DVD versions of The Nutcracker and Swan Lake.

Bushnell said that in Lipstick Jungle: “I tried to show my readers what life is really like, as opposed to the fairy tales about what life is supposed to be.

It shows some of the realities of being successful but it also shows the upside to it and how the struggle is really worth it.”

Among the career women Bushnell said she admired were Tina Brown, the British writer and former editor of The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, who threw a launch party for the book, the fashion designer Vera Wang and Amy Pascal, vice-chairwoman of Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Some observers believe Nico, the chilly magazine editor who exercises at dawn, has more in common with Anna Wintour of American Vogue than with Brown.

The British-born Wintour acknowledged that Bushnell worked with her as a feature writer for Vogue in the 1990s but said: “I’m sure it’s a work of fiction and that it’s entertaining. She’s a wonderful writer.”

Katie Roiphe, the novelist and writer on feminism, said it was “wise” of the trendsetting Bushnell to move on to a new topic but doubted that her view of the world had changed. “Her characters have always been focused on success. In Sex and the City, men represent power, status and shoes.

“Bushnell’s world has always been about transactions and perhaps that intensifies in your forties.”

Bushnell has always been driven to succeed. At the age of eight she decided she wanted to make The New York Times bestseller list and has fulfilled that ambition several times. “Women who live in New York aren’t here to hang out. We’re here to make it,” she said.

For some, power will never be the ultimate aphrodisiac. One critic who adored Sex and the City said she felt let down by Lipstick Jungle. “I cannot understand the lessons to be imparted,” she wrote.

“Should I rent myself a toy boy and concentrate on my career for the next 10 years so that when I’m 40 I’ll join Victory, Nico and Wendy as one of the new power babes? Is that all there is?”

She may have to wait until Bushnell is 50 to discover the next instalment for women.

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