In Kelly Frost’s fast-paced debut novel, girls rule the streets. It’s 1957 in Finsbury Park, north London, and the boys that make up the Coshers gang are away on national service. In their place, the Seven Sisters are guarding their turf, but not without backlash from a neighbouring group of young women – the Kings – who aren’t happy watching a rival gang get their way.

The book opens with Tony in 2017, as she waits to meet her old mates in the pub that was once their meeting place. “Not long after the millennium, someone suggested we start these reunions – although there wasn’t much union left to re,” Frost writes, setting the book’s jocular tone. We learn that Tony escaped Finsbury Park for an international modelling career. What about the rest of them?

Flashing back in time, we are introduced to Tony’s fellow Kings – leader Harry, newly out from two months in Holloway prison; Bert, who is looking to make some extra money to pay for her husband’s secret psychotherapist appointments, which he’s needed since he returned from military service; and Petie, Nell and Bernadette, new recruits picked up at the grammar school gates. At first, the Kings entertain themselves with little more than petty theft. Then over the course of one weekend – a night at the dancehall, and an afternoon on the local wasteland – they learn their violence has real consequences.

Frost is a journalist working in Jersey. Her descriptions of the women’s outfits are addictive: the Kings are Teddy girls, wearing “Edwardian clothing, made for others, cut down to fit their skinny bodies – all sleek and smooth around their spiky joints”.

But best of all is the book’s playfulness with gender. “You’re right. Violence, that sort of behaviour, it’s not for girls,” says Harry to the dancehall governor, using his misogyny to get the Kings out of trouble. The Kings Head’s postwar era is clearly defined. But the questions it asks – namely how young people are meant to find their place in a world where expectations keep changing – are eternal.