What does it mean to be awakened? To want? To love? Jessie Cole is in her late thirties when she meets a man twenty years older than she is. They become lovers. Both passionate and companionable, fraught and uneven, their relationship tests her fears and anxieties. Through their interstate affair, through bushfires and the pandemic, she learns about herself, how her initiations into womanhood shaped who she is now, and how the shadow of family trauma still inhabits her body.
Jessie Cole has written an unabashed, thrilling exploration of the very nature of desire, a story about vulnerability and strength, loss and regeneration. A memoir of the body, Desire is a visceral book in which feeling and longing are laid bare.

'Trust Cole to give us the magic of a deeply embodied book. Prose so vital it seems to breathe and dance from the page. This is a beautiful memoir.' Sarah Krasnostein, author of The Trauma Cleaner and The Believer
'What kind of writer enables the reader to inhabit the author's body? Jessie Cole can make anything from the curl of a leaf to a broken heart remarkable. No author writes about ecological, bodily and relationship grief as tenderly as she does. In Desire Jessie brings us home to the forest, sharing the beauty, danger and wonderment of this intimate world.' Laura Jean McKay, author of The Animals in That Country
'I read Desire in one sitting and haven't stopped thinking about it since. Jessie Cole has written a triumph of a book, unlike any other. You will see yourself on these brilliant pages, a lit-up version you thought you'd left hidden in the dark. They will call Desire brave and vulnerable, a tell-all. But really it is a gift, a risk, a body, a revelation of electric prose. Cole has written a love story. She has shown us what it looks like to believe yourself.' Sarah Sentilles, author of Stranger Care: A Memoir of Loving What Isn't Ours
'A gorgeous journey of a writer seeking out the inaccessible part of herself, of those she loves, and who love her back, and of the forest that holds them all together. Desire is a book of intellectual and emotional depth, exploring the flesh and nerves and sinew - as a mother, a lover, a friend and soothsayer. A tender joy of a book, about life and death, and of all the great pulls in between. Raw and fascinating writing that shimmers with truth and beauty at once. A confession, a lament, a celebration - I cannot recommend this enough.' Tara June Winch
'Luminous with honesty. Revelatory.' Nikki Gemmell, author of Dissolve