Desire Paths

A story about family, connection and the distance we will go to be with the ones we love.

In 2020, as the world is closing its borders, journalist Megan Clement races to be with her father, who is dying on the other side of the world. Trapped in hotel quarantine in Melbourne, she reflects on what it means to be a naturalised Australian – both immigrant to and emigrant from her adopted country – and on a life lived between Stoke-on-Trent, Harare, Melbourne, London and Paris.

This is a story about who gets to cross borders, and what Australia’s obsession with its own frontiers means for those on either side. It is a story of a woman trying to shrink the planet through force of will to bring herself closer to the father she loves, as the world begins to grapple with its greatest health crisis in a century. It is about the paths we create from our own desires, not the ones that have been laid out for us.

PRAISE FOR Desire Paths

Desire Paths is an arresting work ... Its ideas are at once bruisingly big and tender. Clement has a dry wit and a flinty mind and she uses these to devastating effect as she interrogates the death of her father in the middle of the most disruptive global event since the last world war.’ – Rick Morton, author of One Hundred Years of Dirt

‘In the course of this touching and carefully constructed memoir of dealing with the stringencies of the Melbourne lockdowns and the impending death of her terminally ill father, she also considers the nature of home, belonging and the meaning and realities of borders.’ – The Age

‘A compulsive read, and a beautiful untangling of self and statehood.’ – Paul Dalgarno, author of A Country of Eternal Light

‘Hopeful, tragic, funny and poignant, this book blew me away. I was gripped, from beginning to end.’ – Jayne Tuttle, author of Paris or Die

‘A sometimes haunting, always lyrical account of the paths life wears in our hearts and minds.’ – Jonathan Green, author of The Year My Politics Broke

Desire Paths is a story of constant movement across the world, and a journey through grief, told in sometimes incandescent prose. It will be read long after we forget the COVID years which frame the story and the death of Clement's father.’ – Dennis Altman, author of Death in the Sauna