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

‘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

‘With prose that is both tenderly revealing and sharply analytical, Desire Paths is equally at home in the microcosms of the personal and the big picture of international politics. Megan Clement's journalistic expertise reveals the hypocrisies of Australia’s attitude to ‘home‘, showing how it punishes both those of us ensconced here and those we exclude. When she turns the spotlight on herself and her family, this memoir is heartbreaking.’ – Jane Rawson, author of A History of Dreams

‘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