Corfu — Robert Dessaix

One Easter a young actor, far from home, rents a house from a writer he's never heard of called Kester Berwick, and 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. Cavafy. 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 palace called Achilleon; and Berwick himself, the absent centre where all these stories meet.