Great dollops of old-master stagecraft grease the cogs of Anthony Quinn’s prize-winning period fiction. On the second page of his new novel, which runs from VE Day to the early 1960s, the heroine conveniently examines her own reflection (nice to meet you). Her fellow characters routinely pop up as required in an “Ah! Hadn’t seen you there” kind of way, when she’s daydreaming or about to get in her car or just walking in the street. The goal is entertainment, not dreary plausibility, yet there’s psychological chewiness, too.

Quinn’s beat has run from fin-de-siècle slums to 1930s theatreland via Liverpool in the second world war. Now he turns his attention to how horizons broadened (or didn’t) for women after 1945. In London during the victory celebrations, 20-year-old Freya, the daughter of an eminent painter, meets Nancy, aged 18, from Yorkshire. Both want to write. From Oxford staircases to professional life (newsrooms, publishing deals), we follow their friendship before a poisonous falling out leaves them estranged for nearly a decade. Cameo-led subplots of blackmail and murder form a counterpoint to their emotional drama, which snags on a love triangle with another Oxford graduate, Robert.

In the opening scene, Freya keeps mixing Nancy’s drinks despite noticing her new friend’s growing torpor as the party rolls from the street to the pub and back to her Chelsea flat: “Another gin and she’d be under the table... Her body through the thin cotton of her dress felt heated, febrile, willing.”

The language sews a thread of unstated desire that supplies steady tension. Added drama comes from the trials of being a so-called “career girl”: hired by a newspaper after bunking off university exams to get a scoop from the Nuremberg trials, Freya finds her reporting nixed, nabbed and unfairly remunerated by sexist seniors. Her deputy editor – and lover – throws her ​a​ 30th birthday party because (he says) she “never had a 21st, and there’s not been any other big event since”.

“What d’you mean, ‘big event’?”

“Well, big like a wedding, or giving birth, or – I don’t know...”

“Did it ever occur to you that I might have different priorities? What about getting my first salaried job, or my first cover story on the magazine – aren’t they milestones?”

These arguments remain vital but the novel’s use of perspective makes it too nuanced to be taken for a sociopolitical tract. In particular, Freya’s juggernaut self-confidence as a vanguard of equality wrong-foots us. An early scene in which Robert forces himself on her is, like everything else, filtered through her consciousness – the way she sees it, she’s taking his virginity out of pity. We see it that way, too, hesitating only once Robert – a scarily smooth operator – resurfaces as a two-faced high flyer in the Labour shadow cabinet, championing victimised immigrants by day, lurking in Soho’s criminal underworld by night.

This plottiest part of the book amalgamates the Profumo affair and the viciously contested Smethwick byelection, two flashpoints from the end of the Harold Macmillan era. Quinn’s themes and scope – from affairs of the heart to party politics – made me half wonder if, like more or less everyone else these past couple of years, he’d been inhaling Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels and had decided to try his hand at a home-brewed version. Certainly there’s enough left hanging by the end to make you think the story of Freya and Nancy could use another volume; here’s hoping.

Freya is published by Jonathan Cape (£15.99). Click here to buy it for £12.79