Fugitive Blue

Book excerpt: I am not writing this to be sentimental. I am just trying to find an answer to a story... An artistic girl in Renaissance Venice, quietly rebelling against the constraints of her gender. A young milordi on a European Grand Tour, recognising the world and his secret sexuality. A ballerina in nineteenth-century Paris, choosing between suitors. A Greek mother, beginning a new life with her family in a migrant reception centre in regional Australia. And, finally, a paintings conservator in contemporary Melbourne, breaking her own heart. A single, small artwork - subversive, hidden, and oddly blue - somehow survives for five hundred years, linking the lives of these characters. An intricate tale of grief and discovery, of watery destruction and earthly love.