Felicity Volk
Desire Lines
Hachette Australia, 2020
Are you still a liar? The crafting of those five words, even without dispatch, left her chilled.
Arctic Circle, 2012. On a lightless day at the end of the polar winter, landscape architect Evie Waddell finds herself exhuming the past as she buries Australian seeds in a frozen mountain vault - insurance against catastrophe.
Molong, 1953. Catastrophe is all seven-year-old Paddy O'Connor has known. Shipped from institutional care in London to an Australian farm school, his world is a shadowy place where lies scaffold fragile truths and painful memories. To Paddy's south in Canberra, young Evie is safe in her family's embrace, yet soon learns there are some paths from which you can't turn back; impulses and threats that she only half understands but seems to have known forever.
Blue Mountains, 1962. From their first meeting as teenagers at a country market, Paddy and Evie grow a compulsive, unconventional love that spans decades, taking them in directions neither could have foreseen.
Set against the uneasy relationship society has with its own truth-telling in history, war and politics, Desire Lines is an epic story of love and the lies we tell ourselves to survive - and a reminder that even truths which seem lost forever can find their way home.
“Deftly embroidered, the narrative is perfumed, with plants and flowers, signifiers of life, of love...a vivid and sometimes harrowing tale of yearning”
“From the outset, the novel captures the attention of the eye and the mind with its exquisite sensory observation, its breathtakingly exact expressions of feelings and sensations.”
About the Author
Felicity Volk studied English literature and law at the University of Queensland before joining Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT). After diplomatic postings in Bangladesh and Laos, and following the birth of her two daughters, she began writing for publication while continuing to work at DFAT. An award-winning writer of short stories, her first novel, Lightning, was described as 'astonishing ... a propensity of storytelling talent, a bolt of brilliance'. Felicity lives in Canberra, dividing her time between the world of foreign policy, writing, painting murals, tending the family menagerie and a forbearing garden and the gentle contemplations offered by a soothing pot of tea.
