Sod Soho, study Debrett's

Daisy Waugh has pulled off a fast one here. She's written a novel that's frantically up to date about life in London's fast lane, yet delivers a lesson so old-fashioned it could have come from the 19th century. Or almost any before that. It's this: go for a big landowner, girls. A country boy. An Old Etonian, for preference. It's that simple.

Jo is 31. She works in PR, lives on her mobile, has a minimalist flat in Islington and regularly does lines of coke. Jo's boyfriend, Ed, makes cutting-edge television programmes, dresses in Agnes B and uses a facial scrub. They're both too busy to get together often but they seem a neat couple.

Enter two men. Grey McShane is a rough, tough, tall and handsome Glaswegian poet who has just won an enormous recording contract (a reminiscence of Murray Lachlan Young, perhaps). Media London is falling over itself to get in on the act - and Ed wins the race to make a documentary about him. Unhappily, Grey is not what he seems and the programme proves the downfall of Ed.

Charlie Maxwell McDonald, on the other hand, is much more than he seems at first sight. At 33, he's living off Parsons Green, deeply depressed by the death of his twin sister, Georgiana, eight months ago in a hunting accident caused by an anti-blood sports saboteur. Charlie has no apparent career and picks up his living by singing in pubs and wine bars. That's where Jo first sees him, finding him enormously attractive but, of course, hopelessly unfashionable. He thinks coke's a drink. But he is a Decent Bloke. So too is Grey McShane, as it happens, beneath his loutish exterior. The two meet and immediately recognise each other's DB-ness. They become unlikely friends and allies.

Now what do you think is going to happen? Jo tries to inveigle Charlie into her shallow world, but it all falls apart on her and she gets the sack. Luckily, Charlie turns out to be the proprietor of a fantastic estate near Tiverton with "a redbrick Queen Anne manor house, covered in old wisteria and set in a large landscaped park". There he drives around in a Land Rover, "wearing green Wellington boots, a filthy Barbour jacket and a ludicrous Farmer Higgins hat", as clothes-mad Jo notes with horror. But underneath these togs, note well, there is "a torso of breathtaking, movie-star perfection".

Even so, Jo takes a while to get there. She's no country natural. She gets lost in a field wearing " hand-embroidered Emma Hope slip-ons", for example. She makes herself objectionable by denouncing hunting and praising the sabs. But Charlie, for all his unfortunate garb, proves to have a heart of oak as well as the perfect bod.

Daisy Waugh has written this archetypal romance - girl meets boy, yah? - beautifully. It's funny, cynical, and genuinely knowing about media London, unlike most sub-Bridget Jones girly fiction.

She's chosen to use a rather silly gimmick of intermediary chapters ("The New You Survival Kit"), pretending to offer tips on how to live this life of the kind better supplied by our very own ES Magazine. But beneath this diversionary tactic lies the most superbly reactionary fable. So listen up, girls. Sod Soho, study Debrett's.