'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 and crosses continents, 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 moving reminder that even truths which seem lost forever can find their way home.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Epigraph :
'I will not follow where the path may lead,
but I will go where there is no path,
and I will leave a trail.' - Muriel Strode
'Chronicling four generations of two families, Felicity Volk’s Desire Lines is set against landmarks of 20th century Australian history, encompassing a geographical span that begins in the Arctic Circle and ends in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales.'
'‘‘Are you still a liar?” This shocking opening text message confronts readers, offering them a source of awful tension that will not be resolved until the very end. Will the woman send this message, a message she writes annually, to the man she loves?'
'The poet Anne Michaels once wrote that when love finds us, our pasts suddenly become obsolete science. All the secret places left fallow by loneliness are flooded with light and the immanence of the longed-for one draws us into the clearing, stains us with radiance. Yeats’s wing-footed wanderer arrives at last and the miraculous restorations of love and the imperatives of desire render our separate pasts ‘old maps, disproved theories, a diorama’.' (Introduction)
'British nature writer Robert Macfarlane describes desire lines as “paths and tracks made over time by the wishes and feet of walkers … contrary to design or planning”. Felicity Volk’s second novel traces such a contrary path in the unconventional love story of Evie Waddell and Paddy O’Connor: theirs is a grand passion that winds its heady course across continents over five turbulent decades.' (Introduction)
'British nature writer Robert Macfarlane describes desire lines as “paths and tracks made over time by the wishes and feet of walkers … contrary to design or planning”. Felicity Volk’s second novel traces such a contrary path in the unconventional love story of Evie Waddell and Paddy O’Connor: theirs is a grand passion that winds its heady course across continents over five turbulent decades.' (Introduction)
'The poet Anne Michaels once wrote that when love finds us, our pasts suddenly become obsolete science. All the secret places left fallow by loneliness are flooded with light and the immanence of the longed-for one draws us into the clearing, stains us with radiance. Yeats’s wing-footed wanderer arrives at last and the miraculous restorations of love and the imperatives of desire render our separate pasts ‘old maps, disproved theories, a diorama’.' (Introduction)
'‘‘Are you still a liar?” This shocking opening text message confronts readers, offering them a source of awful tension that will not be resolved until the very end. Will the woman send this message, a message she writes annually, to the man she loves?'
'Chronicling four generations of two families, Felicity Volk’s Desire Lines is set against landmarks of 20th century Australian history, encompassing a geographical span that begins in the Arctic Circle and ends in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales.'
