When Notting Hill investment banker Ruby Stanhope is fired via email, she responds with an indignant email of her own before spending the rest of the day consoling herself with Australian pinot noir. Her email goes viral and a severely hungover Ruby wakes to discover that she has drunkenly booked herself on a non-refundable flight to Melbourne, leaving in eleven hours. Once in Victoria, a jetlagged Ruby inadvertently attends a political fundraiser where she meets the ‘pleasant looking’ but ‘unsuitably suited’ Luke Harley, the Opposition leader’s chief of staff. Soon Ruby is inveigled into joining Luke, the Opposition leader and assorted party members and journalists on the campaign trail after the prime minister is ‘toppled’ by his female treasurer in an overnight leadership coup.

Initially, it was tempting to search the novel for distorted sideshow-mirror reflections of the recent leadership spill that resulted in Julia Gillard’s replacing Jessica’s father as Australia’s prime minister. However, Rudd is a talented writer and Campaign Ruby deserves to succeed on its own merits as an entertaining, sometimes frothy and often funny story of fashion, love and federal politics. Despite some weaknesses – certain secondary characters tend to blur together, clothes are occasionally described more vividly than people are, and there are sporadic clichés – this is an enjoyable, intelligent read.

There are to-do lists and designer clothes aplenty and, in true chick lit style, Ruby is simultaneously smart and naïve, practical and accident-prone, beautiful yet unthreatening. She deals with wardrobe malfunctions, Australian idiom, unscrupulous journalists, political snafus, romantic misadventures and the ‘long-socked Bruce from Immigration’ with a combination of optimistic naïveté and common sense (not to mention her trustworthy Toolkit and red-soled Louboutin ankle boots).