‘I can't think of a single one of my flaws’, I say, and I'm only half-joking. When I try to think of what's specifically wrong with me, my head fills with a sort of anxious white noise. Everything could be a flaw. How do I know which parts are real?

When a young Australian woman travels to her family's village in Greece, she arrives full of expectation, imagining connection, belonging and reinvention. Instead, she has the disorienting realisation that she is both insider and outsider.

Troubled by this feeling as it follows her to Alice Springs and then home to Melbourne, she falls back on all the usual things: avoidance, denial, escape. But then, in encounter after encounter, she finds herself touching the real.

Quietly powerful and deeply evocative, More Real is about the stories we inherit, the selves we perform and what it means to feel at home.

'Alive with beauty and menace' —Ellena Savage

‘A radiant debut, as delectable as it is devastating’ —Josephine Rowe