The Maltese Version - by Katy Simpson Smith (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A charged, delightfully offbeat novel of four women forging their way across time, place, and language in search of desire, power, and connection.

Are Leonie and Max in love? They might be, still, or they might simply be living separate but intertwined existences. And she might be pregnant. And he might be missing? He's certainly not answering her text messages, off on some questionable assignment translating poetry from a language he seems to barely know. Malta. He's gone to Malta.

Anna, the poet, guards her work closely as she alternately charges and rambles around her disintegrating island home--the house her father built and filled with his paintings, the house her mother struggled and failed to survive in. Will Max bring her success enough to keep it? Can this foreign man really take her words, her art, into his tongue? Does every partnership require some form of surrender?

Leonie and Rhoda are both travel writers, Rhoda a practical practitioner, a veteran of the island beat. So when Max blinks off the map while on Malta, it's not such a leap for Leonie to ask Rhoda to track him down. Once there, Rhoda might discover more than Max's indiscretions. This Mediterranean island of sun-washed villas undermines her sense of reality. What kind of caper is this? Whose story is being written? And what will she do with a new version of herself?

Full of mischief, charm, and wisdom, Katy Simpson Smith's The Maltese Version upends our notions of love, language, desire, understanding, and the many ways we make meaning.

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.