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The Maltese Version
Overview
One day they were in love and the next, a manuscript appeared in his study, written in a language she didn't speak.
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.Customers Also Bought
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9780374619480
- ISBN-10: 0374619484
- Publisher: Fsg Originals
- Publish Date: August 2026
- Dimensions: 8.25 x 5.44 x 0.8 inches
- Shipping Weight: 0.55 pounds
- Page Count: 320
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Even before its first page, Katy Simpson Smith’s The Maltese Version lets the reader know that it will be a playful kind of novel. The table of contents divides the book into four parts: “A Romance,” “A Fantasy,” “A Mystery,” and “A Thriller.” The first sentence is similarly wry: “One day they were in love and the next, a manuscript appeared in his study, written in a language she didn’t speak.” This couple is Leonie, in her early 30s, and Max, 40, who live in Chicago. Leonie is a travel writer, and Max is an underemployed academic and translator. When Max is offered an unusual translation gig that requires spending a month in Malta, he accepts. But soon after he leaves Chicago, Max seems to drop off the map. Leonie gets no reply to her texts and phone calls. Leonie discovers she may be pregnant, and worried and irritated about Max’s lack of communication, she arranges for her friend and co-worker, Rhoda, to go to Malta on a travel writing assignment and find Max. The novel follows Leonie, Max and Rhoda over the next few weeks. It also dips into the perspectives of Ana, the reclusive poet whose work Max is translating; Lucy, Ana’s housemaid; Herschel, Max’s oddball mentor; and from 40 years in the past, Nunzia, Ana’s mother. The narrative jumps quickly among the characters' struggles: Max attempts to translate; Leonie and Rhoda conspire to find Max; Ana tries to cope with Max’s presence and worries about the debts her ex-husband left her; and Lucy observes all. One of Simpson Smith’s (The Weeds) preoccupations in this work seems to be unequal relations between men and women. Threaded throughout the novel, too—as much subject as theme—are explorations of translation, writing, language and creation. Characters play with language, working their way through one line and another as they translate a poem; they ponder and discuss Malta’s first known poem, the 15th-century “Il Kantilena.” If this sounds like a lot, it is. But The Maltese Version keeps the reader turning pages as it roams this Mediterranean island setting, and with its often funny narration, brings the story to a satisfying, surprising conclusion.
Even before its first page, Katy Simpson Smith’s The Maltese Version lets the reader know that it will be a playful kind of novel. The table of contents divides the book into four parts: “A Romance,” “A Fantasy,” “A Mystery,” and “A Thriller.” The first sentence is similarly wry: “One day they were in love and the next, a manuscript appeared in his study, written in a language she didn’t speak.” This couple is Leonie, in her early 30s, and Max, 40, who live in Chicago. Leonie is a travel writer, and Max is an underemployed academic and translator. When Max is offered an unusual translation gig that requires spending a month in Malta, he accepts. But soon after he leaves Chicago, Max seems to drop off the map. Leonie gets no reply to her texts and phone calls. Leonie discovers she may be pregnant, and worried and irritated about Max’s lack of communication, she arranges for her friend and co-worker, Rhoda, to go to Malta on a travel writing assignment and find Max. The novel follows Leonie, Max and Rhoda over the next few weeks. It also dips into the perspectives of Ana, the reclusive poet whose work Max is translating; Lucy, Ana’s housemaid; Herschel, Max’s oddball mentor; and from 40 years in the past, Nunzia, Ana’s mother. The narrative jumps quickly among the characters' struggles: Max attempts to translate; Leonie and Rhoda conspire to find Max; Ana tries to cope with Max’s presence and worries about the debts her ex-husband left her; and Lucy observes all. One of Simpson Smith’s (The Weeds) preoccupations in this work seems to be unequal relations between men and women. Threaded throughout the novel, too—as much subject as theme—are explorations of translation, writing, language and creation. Characters play with language, working their way through one line and another as they translate a poem; they ponder and discuss Malta’s first known poem, the 15th-century “Il Kantilena.” If this sounds like a lot, it is. But The Maltese Version keeps the reader turning pages as it roams this Mediterranean island setting, and with its often funny narration, brings the story to a satisfying, surprising conclusion.