Nepal, Jan. 6 -- The novel 'Desire Lines', written by the current Australian ambassador to Nepal, Felicity Volk, is a spaghetti bowl of several desire lines crisscrossing multiple themes of love, relationship, emotional gratification, career and, of course, life in its entirety. The plot is knitted over at least two-thirds of a century, beginning in the early 1950s, covering an equally vast geography spanning Australia through Asia to the Arctic Circle, the cold ice caves of Norway to the Blue Mountains of New South Wales.

These 'lines', per se, run through the 'desires' of Volk's protagonists to keep their relationship alive for fifty long years despite asymmetries in their preferences and proven disloyalty, evoke extreme psycho-social ...