Volk has already staked out this particular terrain with striking lyrical talent in her previous novel Lightning (2013), which is also preoccupied with the long shadows of the past and the dislocations of harrowing histories. Desire Lines extends the territory of her earlier meditations on loss and redemption in a luminous and heart-wrenching novel of chiaroscuro in which the world is a perilous place that even unforeseen bestowals of grace cannot redeem; a treacherous minefield where people’s troubled pasts threaten to detonate at any moment.

In Desire Lines, the central character, Paddy O’Connor, is a literary version of Wagner’s earnest knight and guardian of the Holy Grail Amfortas, perpetually divided, possessed by a never-healing wound and yet longing for transcendent wholeness. Born into strife and penury in 1950s London, the young Paddy is placed in an orphanage and then sent to Australia by his tragically beleaguered mother to save him from the horrors she knows await him at the hands of his violent father. ‘She must really love you to let you go like this,’ a kindly chaperone on the ship to Australia says to the inconsolable, seasick seven year old early in the novel. It is the first intimation that love and sacrifice, protection and pain, are intricately interwoven; that sometimes it becomes impossible to tell where one begins and the other ends.

Paddy, growing up at one of the infamous Fairbridge Farm schools, is subjected to chilling varieties of deprivation and debasement, until he finds a way to climb free into a different life, winning a scholarship to a prestigious college in the Blue Mountains. Edward Said once wrote that it was unsurprising that exiles often become novelists, intellectuals, chess players; that the refugee tries to compensate for disorienting loss by creating a new world to rule. Paddy forges this kind of consoling order through his career as an architect, finding comfort in: ‘The calm anticipation before he detonated a lonely nothing to fashion a something: matter, stars, galaxies; breathing life into the cosmic dust and growing from it company for himself, love, fervour, devotion.’

Those who have been damaged can become dangerous to others, and there is something awry within Paddy, a Faustian split that allows him to inflict unintended but deep harm upon the woman he loves. Paddy meets Evie Waddell as a teenager, and the arc of the novel follows the interlacing of their fates over the years, the fraught latticework of their shared lives, and the questing narratives of each individual as they grapple with the wounds of love and their gravitational pull towards each other.

One of Volk’s greatest achievements in the novel is that each of her characters is granted their own complex wisdom. It is not just Paddy who leaps to life on the page; Evie herself is vividly and compellingly rendered. It was Virginia Woolf who said that to create a fully realised female character the writer must think poetically and prosaically, that she must embrace both the quotidian nature of any life and the fact that every woman is ‘a vessel in which all sorts of spirits and forces are coursing and flashing perpetually’. Volk’s extraordinary ability to inhabit her characters’ lives in the round is achieved not so much with an abundance of detail or accretion of backstory, but with something far more rare and intangible – a sustained attention to the selfhood of others. Even the minor characters feel luxuriantly realised and richly human; Volk grants her fictional creations all the contradictions, stumbling hesitations, and mysteriousness of real people.

There is a lovely spaciousness to Desire Lines; Volk has seamlessly fashioned her form around her content, and her prose is full of beauty and precision. She has serious lessons to impart but she is never sententious. 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.

Perhaps Volk’s finest accomplishment is that her novel leads us to excavate our own buried and half-forgotten histories, our vows kept and those broken, the lies we tell to ourselves and one another, the compromises we make to remain intact. The novel takes its title from Bachelard’s notion of chemins de desir; the errant, unmapped paths that walkers trace through the landscape. Desire lines are about resistance and agency; about the ways that we remake the world and the ways that we find to exist within it. It is not always possible to love each other into safety. It is not always possible to make things right. But like Paddy, like Evie, we never give up hope that we too might be remade, that we might be rescued.