A story within a story, Desolation raises questions about karma, innocence, love and choice. It asks, is the road through grief paved with devotion to vengeance or to simply live?

In modern-day Adelaide, a 37-year-old writer working in a café notices a man staring at him. This seems innocuous enough, until the man finally approaches and demands that the writer listen to his story, offering nothing but a three-digit number as enticement. The story of our mysterious, pseudonymous protagonist ‘Amin’ traces the ripples left in the wake of the tragic downing of Iran Air Flight 655 – not just three digits, but the pivot point upon which his life revolves. What follows is a life story: from the dawn of innocence through first love, loss, and the unravelling of hope in the face of trauma.

Building on his Miles Franklin-shortlisted debut Only Sound Remains, Hossein Asgari takes us through a reflection on the power of storytelling (both to others and oneself) in shaping how we see the world and how we make choices that shape it. As the writer character shares his subject’s story, we cannot help but wonder how much is embellished by the re-teller, or by the subject himself. We also question the extent to which the stories we tell ourselves about our own lives – to make sense of things we cannot process without some kind of meaning behind them – are re-formed around the kernel of our own motivations, consciously or otherwise.

Asgari considers how the human desire for meaning shapes our actions in reaction to the choices of others – who are, of course, themselves reactive. Without passing judgment on the behaviour of his characters, Asgari presents the aftermath of history as its own tragedy – the invisible scars left behind, and the lives and futures cut short or irreparably derailed by those in power: governmentally, culturally and institutionally.