The Maltese Version - by Katy Simpson Smith (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

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."
--Publisher's Weekly

"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

About the Author

Katy Simpson Smith was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. She is the author of the novels The Story of Land and Sea, a Vogue best book of the year; Free Men; The Everlasting, a New York Times best historical novel of the year; and The Weeds. She is also the author of We Have Raised All of You: Motherhood in the South, 1750-1835. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Oxford American, Granta, and Literary Hub, among other publications. She received a PhD in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She lives in New Orleans.