Jessica Rudd wrote Campaign Ruby in a bar in Beijing. she wrote it fast, in just seven months last year. Not once as she was working on her laptop in that Chinese skyscraper did some mysterious instinct give her reason to pause. She was new to the capital, having only just moved there to live. But her novel isn't about China - or about anything that could possibly upset Australia's most important trading partner. No spies, no bribes, no iron-ore salesmen.

On the other hand, perhaps Kevin Rudd should have read his daughter's novel after she finished writing it in December because in politics, as in fiction, plot is everything. You never know: even if Jessica didn't experience one of those odd, intuitive moments, almost like a premonition, her father might have sensed something of the political beheading awaiting him less than six months down the track. Or at least felt a shiver down his spine. Because Campaign Ruby is about a young woman who finds a new career path for herself during an Australian federal election campaign that's triggered when the fictional prime minister, Hugh Patton, is overthrown by his fictional woman treasurer, Gabrielle Brennan.

An amazing coincidence? Well, quite. Let's run through it again. A prime minister's daughter sits down and writes a novel with a plot that proceeds, more or less, to come true. Less than two months before the book is due to be published, the author's father is deposed by his deputy, a woman, in a palace coup. A good plot for a novel, come to think of it. The only bit missing from Jessica Rudd's work of fiction is that Patton doesn't accuse Brennan of reneging on a deal not to challenge him.

The cover of Jessica Rudd's book.

Who knows where stories come from, really? It's always possible that Jessica's unconscious writing mind tapped into the sort of private family conversations that must have taken place from time to time about the ambitions of Julia Gillard - but the author wastes no time in telling me that she wrote the chapter in which Brennan topples Patton at the start of September 2009, when Newspoll had Labor on 55. "Dad was at an enviable 65 per cent as preferred PM," she says. "I created a sequence of events that could have applied to any period in Australian politics."

Certainly, she could have had no inkling of her novel's extraordinary prescience; and nor are there any leaks from Canberra to suggest that Kevin Rudd is for the chop, despite the horrible time he is having in the polls, when I fly to Beijing to meet his 26-year-old daughter - a mere two weeks before Gillard makes her move.

The novel is no Primary Colours (the anonymously authored roman-à-clef about Bill and Hillary Clinton), but it's very entertaining, with some hilariously cruel lines about the media. I take it with me on the plane to reread, along with David Marr's controversial Quarterly Essay on Kevin Rudd, which may explain why fact and fiction have already begun to blur by the time we enter Chinese airspace.

One reason for this is the way that Marr begins his essay with Kevin's previously unreported and now notorious lapse in foreign-policy finesse at the Copenhagen climate-change conference in December. It seems to me that both the lapse and the former PM's language - "Those Chinese f...ers are trying to rat-f...! us" - could have come straight from a scene in Campaign Ruby.

Ruby is Ruby Stanhope, an English former investment banker and fashionista, who lucks into a job as financial policy adviser to Max Masters, the Australian leader of the opposition - otherwise known as the LOO. The accident-prone Ruby didn't plan for such a radical change in her career. When the novel opens, she's living happily in London, earning the sort of money that allows her to order Louboutin boots online without a second's thought. Unexpectedly, and to her fury, her job in "emerging markets" is made redundant after the GFC wrecks the emerging bit.

Displaying character traits vaguely reminiscent of Bridget Jones, Ruby proceeds to get blind drunk on Australian pinot noir and, as a result, winds up in Australia, with last year's bonus and a tourist visa. In similarly chaotic fashion, she manages to land the job with the LOO, just before the federal election is called.

"There's been a spill."

"Oil?" [Ruby's clueless query.]

"No, mate, a spill in the government."

"Is someone ... er ... cleaning it up?"

Despite, or maybe because of, her ignorance about most things outside fashion and the financial markets, as well as her habit of addressing people as "cock", her mishaps in toilets, her exuberance with alcohol and her political faux pas, ultimately Ruby proves to be an asset to her boss. Come the election, Max Masters wins.

Jessica Rudd worked on her father's 2007 election campaign when he was elected PM. She isn't a former investment banker - she trained as a lawyer - but she's married to a banker: Hong Kong-born, Brisbane-raised Albert Tse. The couple moved to London soon after the 2007 Australian federal election. They relocated to Beijing, where Tse works for Macquarie Capital, in June last year, the same month Jessica started to write her book.

Back in Chinese airspace, I'm still mulling over the cast of characters in Campaign Ruby and, rightly or wrongly, reaching the conclusion that some of the more familiar-seeming figures are composites of personalities from both sides of the real-life political divide.

Take Mick O'Donoghue, a former PM known for his "episodic outbursts", who attacks his party and its leader in a highly critical newspaper article. Luke Harley, the LOO's chief of staff, explains to Ruby that there's a highly debilitating condition called ex-PMS, or former prime minister's syndrome, that's usually exacerbated by such things as relevance deprivation, boredom, alcohol, natural light and the good fortune of his successors. Malcolm Fraser and Paul Keating, with a sprinkling of Mark Latham?

And who is Oscar Franklin, the handsome if far-too-smooth TV political-affairs correspondent who manages to seduce Ruby - but is really after her BlackBerry?

For that matter, who is Ruby Stanhope, the policy adviser with a thing for designer shoes, who switches from financing Kazakh pipelines to getting prime ministers elected, purely on the strength of a terrible hangover?

By the time my plane lands, fact and fiction have blurred to the point of no return. A must-ask question springs to mind while I'm standing outside the airport at 1am, looking for a taxi: how would Ruby react if Max Masters were caught out calling the Chinese rat-f...ers?

Much later that day, heading into Beijing's traffic-clogged streets on our way to the bar where everything be­- gan, Jessica leans forward and gives the taxi driver instructions in what she insists to me is very basic Mandarin.

It seems completely natural that the author should be living in the Chinese capital. Yes, her husband's job took them there, but for Jessica Rudd, it feels almost like coming home. She was born in Canberra, but moved to Beijing with her parents within a very short time, living there until she was about 2 1/2. One of her earliest childhood memories is of a cook folding pastry for dumplings in the kitchen.

Kevin Rudd was a diplomat in the Chinese capital during the 1980s, long before he became Australia's first Mandarin-speaking prime minister. His wife, Thérèse Rein, used to push their daughter in her pram through Ritan Park, one of Beijing's oldest, most beautiful parks, in the city's embassy district.

There's a wonderful old cafe in the park that floats on a pond, the author tells me while we're still in the taxi. She worked on her novel there, too - once or twice during the winter while children skated on the frozen pond outside. "I've always felt an attachment to China, and I guess I've always been attracted to the idea of coming back here," she adds.

The bar, her unofficial office for seven months, turns out to be a haunt for local writers. Hidden behind an obscure front door on the 35th level of a building that's both an office block and a high-rise apartment building, it's surprisingly small - probably because it was once somebody's flat. The main thing is that it commands stupendous, almost dreamlike views of Beijing through disproportionately large windows. It is positively eyrie-like. Albert would go to work each morning, and so would his wife - just as she always had. "I need noise to write," she says. "I need it to be busy. This place is busy and smoky a lot of the time. I type like Stevie Wonder plays - I look around the room."

Here we sit for the next couple of hours, over iced tea and fried tofu, while a young Chinese man sits hunched over his laptop in a fug of cigarette smoke at the next table. The setting is beautifully bizarre and becomes even more so as Jessica explains that Ruby first started taking shape in her mind when she and Albert were still living in London, in 2008. She was working in PR by then, having already decided before they left Australia that she didn't want to make a career as a lawyer. "I liked the advocacy side of law - but that was all," she explains.

As a result of the GFC, people they knew, friends in banking, began losing their jobs. "It was both a sad thing and a wonderful thing, because a lot of people were doing jobs they didn't like, but jobs that [were well paid]. There were amazing history grads and East Asia fine arts grads from Oxford and Cambridge working as investment bankers." Being laid off can be awful at the time, she goes on, but can help people discover where their real talents - and a more emotionally rewarding future - lie. "Ruby ended up being very good at investment banking, but she didn't really love it. And her world was turned completely on its head."

Just as Jessica didn't really love being a lawyer. Just as her own world was turned completely on its head when she became involved in her father's election campaign. But Ruby isn't her, she goes on to say - predictably. And the novel is pure fiction. "I'm sorry. I know that's not the answer you wanted," she adds, in the nicest possible way.

"When I started writing Ruby, I could hear her voice. She felt like my best friend. I wish I was more like Ruby, because she has a fantastic wardrobe. I have enormous feet - size 10 - so it's hard to find shoes in China, where most women have lovely, dainty feet rather than the giant clodhoppers at the end of my shins. When I wrote about Ruby's Louboutins, her Miu Miu wedges, her elegant black pumps and sexy slingbacks, I was pining for a shop."

For the record, Jessica is wearing a summery white dress with polka dots, and stunning white high heels (bought in Hong Kong). Her nails are long works of art. They're white, too. But her warmth is real: she doesn't appear to be someone whose word you'd doubt.

It was while she and albert were in London, she goes on to say, that she discussed her idea for a novel with the Australian expat author Kathy Lette, who's a good friend. Lette advised her to write about what she knew. "And I know politics," says Jessica. "Since I was four years old, my dad has been involved in politics. I fell in love with politics. I studied it at university and I'm a total West Wing junkie."

The pace of Campaign Ruby comes directly from her experience of working on her father's campaign, she concedes. "My job was to keep him sane." She wanted to capture the sense of "not knowing where you are, which city you're in, which hotel, and where the bathroom is, for that matter", as well as the feeling that things could go "wildly wrong" at any point. A sense of having to skirt peril constantly. "If there's anything I don't like about writing, it's not having that rush," she adds. "There isn't the adrenalin that kicks in. It's not do or die. Catastrophising helps me write creative fiction."

Ruby ends up in bed with Oscar Franklin, the aforementioned TV journalist. She's then quizzed about which reporter she's slept with. Wisely, she refuses to identify him.

"They're mostly feral. Did you sleep with a feral one?"

"No."

"Then you slept with a hot one. This narrows it substantially - pretty much rules out print and radio."

What did Thérèse Rein think of the chapter where Oscar beds Ruby?

"She was fine with it," says Jessica. All the same, she admits she asked her publisher, Michael Heyward, half jokingly, whether they could have a sealed section for her parents.

Thérèse read the novel as her daughter was writing it, she goes on. Jessica emailed it to her mother, chapter by chapter - with Thérèse giving her instant feedback. "At one point, she was in Trinidad with Dad, and she fed-back on the chapter in about five minutes on her BlackBerry from the back of a convoy somewhere. She was so encouraging throughout the process."

What about the chapter in which PM Patton is overthrown by Brennan? "She said, 'Oooh, loved that! When can you send me the next one?' "

Aside from sex with journalists - only one, and she repents - Ruby's moment of realpolitik arrives when she discovers, to her shock, that the party whose leader she's working for doesn't support adoption for gay and single parents. Ruby rings her politically aware aunt: she wants out. Her aunt tells her not to be silly - that it's vital to remain a part of the political process if she wants to make a difference.

"That dialogue wasn't something I consciously created," says Jessica. "I wrote it down and read it back to myself and thought, 'Yeah, it's so true.' " Ruby had been enjoying the experience of campaigning without seriously thinking about what she believed in, she adds. "That's just the reality of party politics. You are never going to wholly endorse absolutely everything a party stands for. But you're not going to help if you're not part of it."

Kevin Rudd was opposed to amending the Marriage Act in order to make gay marriage a reality. Peter Garrett, his Minister for Environment Protection, Heritage and the Arts, has been accused more than once by his green constituency of forsaking his principles for the sake of political power. Garrett once talked in a Good Weekend profile about "the necessary disciplines of working in a team". Jessica never directly answers my question about whether she and her father ever discussed gay marriage - or whether Garrett's response to his critics fed into her writing. Don't read too much into this section of the novel, is all she says. "I could just as easily have written it about [Ruby's] views clashing with the party's on wind farms or home births."

Her eye for the absurd side of politics, and the way the media turns everything into a blood sport, is one of her strengths as a writer. For instance, when Max Masters is castigated by a TV interviewer for using the expression "a load of bull" in a press conference, he replies by saying that he thinks most Australians would be comfortable with this sort of language. The interviewer retorts that a radio program has done a quick poll, and 67 per cent of listeners thought it inappropriate - and did this mean that the PM was suggesting these people were unAustralian?

The incident kicks off a national debate about swearing, to the satisfaction of the LOO's chief of staff: "Everyone wants to talk to you today because they think you have a foul mouth."

People will inevitably read between the lines of Campaign Ruby, I comment to Jessica at one stage. "I just hope people enjoy reading it, rather than reading into it," she counters.

A little later, I pose another must-ask question: if Max Masters put a keenly awaited emissions trading scheme on hold, would Ruby tell him he'd live to regret it?

"I'll tell you what," says Jessica, as nicely as before. "I don't want to provide, and I won't provide, a running commentary on what my dad's doing. Just as he won't comment, I hope, on the number of F words that Ruby drops in this book."

When jessica rudd was a baby, her father used to calm her down - whenever she woke crying in the middle of the night - by picking her up and running her fingers along the book spines in his bookshelves. As a schoolgirl during exam time, she did the same thing as a way of countering stress, walking around her father's study in the family home in Brisbane, trailing her fingers along his books. As an adult, she seeks out libraries and bookstores for the same reason. She adores her father: "I've known Dad all my life. Compassion is the essence of his soul."

In his profile of her father, David Marr described a man driven by anger. Jessica says only that she hasn't yet read Marr's piece; the Quarterly Essay isn't at the top of her bedside reading pile. She becomes inscrutable when I mention the "rat-f...ers" quote. "I guess when you enter public life, you take the good with the bad," is all she will say.

As a 12-year-old, Jessica took part in an Aboriginal rights march in Brisbane. At 14, incensed by Pauline Hanson's politics, she set up a school organisation, PRARG: the Pro Reconciliation and Anti Racism Group. "There were these horrendous things being said by this person who was becoming influential in Queensland politics and in federal politics," she remarks. "It was so that we could say as a school community, 'No, we do not believe that racism is the way forward. We believe in reconciliation.' I think we all felt as young people, particularly in Queensland, because that's where One Nation started, that, 'No, that's not where our country is going.' ?"

Kevin Rudd's apology speech to indigenous Australians remains one of the proudest moments of her life. She was in Parliament that day and says, "It was incredible, sitting up there in the Speaker's gallery. There were amazing Aboriginal women sitting near me, just sobbing with relief as my dad spoke, and I was so proud of him for doing that, and uniting the nation."

So then, what did she make of John Howard when he was prime minister?

"I think it takes enormous energy to run a country. So I respected and admired him for the energy that he had ... I've seen my dad do it. My dad doesn't have a sleeping problem," she adds as an aside, referring to all the media commentary about how Kevin Rudd would do everyone a favour if he got more sleep.

Jessica married Albert Tse, her boyfriend of six years, shortly before the 2007 federal election campaign. She met him in her father's electoral office. He was working in a voluntary position - and at first she couldn't stand him. "I thought he was a preppie Churchie boy."(Albert, who came to Australia with his family in 1989 and has never given an interview to the media, is an old boy of Brisbane's Anglican Church Grammar School.)

"We spent about three years just fighting. One day I was sitting at home at my parents' place, watching TV and my mobile rang. It was Albert. He said, 'Hi, put the phone next to the TV and turn up the volume.' I thought something politically important must be happening, because the only thing we had in common was the work we were doing in the community," she says.

Jessica turned on the channel he'd requested. The Simpsons was showing. Mystified, she sat there for a few minutes, then picked up the phone again. "Listen, do you know who you've called, out of interest?" she asked him.

"Oh shit," said Albert, and hung up. He rang back five minutes later, "apologised profusely" and explained that he thought he'd called a friend called Jennifer; hers was the next name on his mobile. He was at the gym on the treadmill, had forgotten his headphones and couldn't go without an episode. Albert's addiction to The Simpsons put him in a completely different light for the future prime minister's daughter. "I decided that there was something quite endearing about that phone call. It was either really cunning and calculated and very creative, or it was just a complete stuff-up. And I know him - and I know it was the latter."

During the campaign, the couple made a joint appearance at a function in Bennelong, the Sydney seat held for 33 years by John Howard until Maxine McKew ousted him. Bennelong has a large Chinese-Australian population. Albert gave a speech in Cantonese at the function; Jessica in Mandarin. The media was already describing Albert Tse as Kevin Rudd's "secret weapon".

Recalling the victorious election night that followed, Jessica adds that she became very emotional watching John Howard's concession speech on TV. "That's a family up there," she says, "and they've been through a lot, as a family. And I felt really proud of them, actually."

Two weeks after she says this in Beijing, I glimpse her standing near her devastated father as he gives his final press conference as prime minister and wonder if she remembers that remark.

I felt enormously proud of [my father], and grateful for the gift of a strong family," she writes in an email soon afterwards. She also makes very clear that she finds no joy whatsoever in the extraordinary overlap between her novel and the dramatic events in Canberra.

"I felt sick in the depths of my stomach when I heard the utterly unimaginable scenario I had dreamed up in the middle of last year for the purposes of a rollicking read might quickly become a close and deeply personal reality. I called Michael [Heyward], my publisher, from The Lodge, in tears. 'Michael, my book is coming true.' Michael said, 'Jess, you didn't make this happen.' It sounds a silly thing to say, because of course I didn't make it happen," Jessica goes on. "But until Michael said it, deep down I felt it might have been my fault. The coincidence was too spooky. I wanted to uncreate it. But Michael reminded me that I wrote Campaign Ruby to bring laughter to readers and open a window into the weird world of politics. The events of last week don't change that."

She says her father has been equally reassur-ing, telling her, "Don't worry, darling; you didn't do this."

Will she write a sequel to Campaign Ruby? "I really enjoyed creating her. I don't want to say goodbye to her," she'd said in Beijing. "But look around you. I'm on the 35th floor of a tower block. That way lie the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square. I just don't feel I'm connected to what's happening in Australia. It's easier for me to divorce the Australian political reality from my fiction. If I did write a sequel, I would do that again. What I can tell you is that I want to make a career out of this."

No more specifics are forthcoming for now. But, she adds, her 16-year-old brother, Marcus, has asked if she could write that he wins Lotto.

This article first appeared with Good Weekend magazine in Saturday's Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.