Kylie Needham's masterful Girl In A Pink Dress opens with a scene-setting prologue that sees the titular character regarding a woman depicted in you guessed it. It's opening night and Frances can feel the recognition of "a pair of old men in grey suits and glasses" as she looks up at a picture weighted with so much meaning and memory she begins to regret not staying at home.

Having whetted our appetites, Needham unfurls an engaging story of art, love and compromise. In refreshingly economical prose, Needham tells the story of Frances, an art student of uncommon talent, and her love affair with her much older teacher, the artist Clem Hughes, a nepo baby hailing from a time long before the phrase was coined.

The idea of the older male artist seducing his younger female muse is a familiar one, but there's nothing hackneyed about Needham's depiction of this complicated coupling. The writing is taut and controlled, the characterisation pitch perfect, and the visuals appropriately cinematic for a writer whose screenwriting credits include Blue Heelers and Home and Away.

If, like me, you prefer character, scene and feeling to plot, you'll probably enjoy this book. It's evocative and textured, the literary equivalent perhaps of a moody Hieronymus Bosch panel - minus the weirdness. We can argue about analogies, but there's no denying Needham's knack for teleporting the reader into this lusty, lustrous tale.

The narrative traverses time and place, from the mentor's studio 25 years ago ("I wore Clem's painting shirts and nothing else"), to the gold rush country where Frances lives and works ("My cottage stands alone on the crest of a hill on the western edge of town"), to the Paddington gallery where Frances first encountered the artist she'd give so much ("musty beige carpet, low ceilings and a steep wooden staircase that had claimed more than a few drunken art collectors in its time").

But Girl In A Pink Dress isn't all scene and mood. Frances' first-person narration steers the story through an examination of that age-old question: Can two ambitious people both thrive in a relationship? Frances hints at an answer when she thinks back to that opening in Paddington. "It should have been clear to me how unequal we were".

Buy Girl In A Pink Dress for yourself. Buy it for someone else. Buy it for your daughter and make her promise not to park her ambitions to help some bloke succeed. Just get your hands on a copy. I'm off to the gallery.