'In Angela O’Keeffe’s debut novel, Night Blue, the reader is asked to suspend their disbelief and invest in the consciousness of an inanimate object, Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles. The painting’s story is well-known. There was outrage in 1973 when this colossal work of American abstract expressionism was purchased by the Whitlam government. Some thought Australia should be investing in its own artists. Others scorned its experiment and its cost.' (Introduction)