A wry, thoughtful and beautifully evocative novel about living abroad and the search for home.

When one Easter a young actor from Adelaide rents a house from a writer he’s never heard of called Kester Berwick, he becomes fascinated by the absent Berwick’s rootless, self-invented existence. Gradually, he finds his own life strangely echoing the absent writer’s, as Corfu’s eccentric expatriate community opens up to him.

But is travelling a search or an escape? Is stillness stultifying or liberating? And where do love, sex and friendship fit?

CORFU is also a meditation on literary landscapes, from Homer and Sappho to Chekhov and C.P. Calvary. Dessaix is alive to Corfu’s ghosts – Odysseus, washed up naked on the shore to be found by the princess Nausicca; Elisabeth, Empress of Austria, who, hopelessly adrift on dreams of Homer, built a place called Achilleon; and Berwick himself, the absent centre where all these stories meet.