Leonie and Max are on separate but tangled paths. Now, she might be pregnant. And he’s not answering her texts, off on some questionable assignment translating poetry from a language he seems barely to know.
As Ana moves through the disintegrating island house her father filled with his paintings, the house where her mother struggled to survive, she guards her poems closely. Will Max bring her success enough to keep it? Can this foreign man rewrite her words, her art, into his tongue? Does every partnership require some form of surrender?
When Max blinks off the map, Leonie asks Rhoda—expert travel writer—to track him down to Malta. Once there, Rhoda might discover more than Max’s indiscretions. This Mediterranean island’s sun-baked wildness undermines Rhoda’s sense of reality. What kind of caper is unfolding? And what will she do with this new version of herself?
Charged and mischievous, Katy Simpson Smith's The Maltese Version upends the stability of language, desire, and the ways we make meaning.
“A fascinating ode to language, with all its pleasures and pitfalls. Mysterious, reflective, strange, and full of wonder. I couldn’t put it down.”
- Bruna Dantas Lobato, author of Blue Light Hours
"Katy Simpson Smith playfully turns the Mediterranean psychological thriller on its head with this lush, finely textured, riveting dive into lives tangled by language and time. The Maltese Version is irresistible."
- Téa Obreht, author of The Morningside
“The Maltese Version whisked me to places I did not expect. What a pleasurable and thrilling experience, to live inside of Katy Simpson Smith's assured and gorgeous vision: to be led into stony landscapes and the Mediterranean Sea as readily as profound questions about love, language, translation, and desire. Breathtaking, singular, and stunning—this is a book that you cannot read without emerging transformed.”
- Rachel Khong, author of Real Americans
A People Most-Anticipated Summer Read
“[Smith] brilliantly illustrates the many imperfect ways in which people try to comprehend one another . . . Focusing a vigilant eye on women’s inner complexities, [she] presents a spirited, curious, and linguistically adept novel that should thrill armchair travelers and readers of intellectual literary fiction."
- Sarah Johnson, Booklist (starred review)
“A stimulating and slippery anti-detective novel . . . This intelligent and entertaining tale provides readers with much to ponder.”