Dark obsessions drive this debut about the golden era of magazines – but its vile and hilarious heroine is not someone you want to spend so much time with

Last year the New York Times ran a quiz entitled “Could You Have Landed a Job at Vogue in the 90s?” It was based on the fabled four-page exam Anna Wintour had would-be assistants sit – a cultural literacy test containing questions about 178 notable people, places, books and films. I’m afraid that this former (British) Vogue intern did not pass muster: wrong era, wrong country.

A woman who almost certainly would pass with flying colours is the former Vogue staffer Caroline Palmer, now the author of a novel, Workhorse, set at “the magazine” during the dying days of a golden age of women’s glossies, when the lunches were boozy, the couture was free and almost anything could be expensed. In this first decade of the new millennium, we meet Clodagh, or Clo, a suburban twentysomething “workhorse” trying to make it in a world of rich, beautiful, well-connected “show horses”, and willing to do almost anything to get there.