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.