The Maltese Version

by Katy Simpson Smith

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.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction

320 pages, Paperback

Published August 18, 2026

About the author

Katy Simpson Smith attended Mount Holyoke College and received a PhD in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She has been working as an Adjunct Professor at Tulane University and is the author of We Have Raised All of You: Motherhood in the South, 1750-1835. Her debut novel, The Story of Land and Sea, was published by Harper in August 2014. She lives in New Orleans.

Reviews

[Venneh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid farce that has a lot to say about relationships, literature in translation, understanding each other, and throws in a mild farce and complication in the form of a possible pregnancy, while also being slightly meta in parodying genres based on which seciton the novel is in. Interesting work of craft, and definitely worth your time.

[Laura Beebe · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don’t know why I bought a book about translating poetry. It’s dull confusing and infuriating all at once.

[Fran · Rating 3 out of 5]

Katy Simpson Smith's "The Maltese Version" is full of characters I just could not like. There is Leonie, a limp young woman who does not appear to know who she is or what she wants from life. Max, Leonie's more or less live-in lover, is outwardly respectable and talented and inwardly a cheater and another person who has apparently not found himself yet. Ana, a poet famous on tiny Malta and who's poems are written in the Maltese language, which few outside of Malta understand, is queenly, but unreliable. Rhoda, Leonie's friend, is the only one with any spirit or ambition in life. And finally, there is Herschel, who seems to be Max's agent and abruptly packs him off to Malta to translate Ana's poems into an English volume. Here is the description of the main characters from the review in the Clarion-Ledger / Hattiesburg American Mississippi Books page (https://msbookspage.wordpress.com/202...

"Leonie is a travel writer and Max is a translator who gets his work assignments from Herschel, his slightly mysterious former translation professor. Rhoda, Leonie’s friend and travel writing coworker, offers a bit of no nonsense reality to Leonie’s slightly dreamy and chaotic aura. The windows around Leonie are always a little smudged; Rhoda wipes them clean."

The Maltese person whose work is to be translated by Max is Ana. She is a poet who is not yet famous outside of Malta, but because she needs money to support her crumbling house, she agrees to be translated into English in hopes of increasing her book sales. But after a couple of weeks, she finds that she just cannot get along with Max, who she sees as offensively male and fears that his translation will give him too much ownership of her precious poems. Max, on the other hand, is all but Ana's captive. Ana insists on Max surrendering his cell phone to her when he arrives, so he never bothers to contact Leonie to indicate he is alive and well. And despite his four-year relationship with Leonie, Max immediately seeks a love affair with Ana, which just makes matters worse in Ana's view. In Max's absence, Leonie discovers that she is pregnant, but she can't reach Max to tell him, which just makes her even more upset about his radio silence. So, Leonie convinces Rhoda to get their editor to send her to Malta, ostensibly to develop a new guidebook to Malta but in reality so that Rhoda can track Max down.

If this plot sounds a bit chaotic, it is. The review in the Southern Review of Books (https://southernreviewofbooks.com/202...) wraps up as follows: "I found the conclusion to Leonie and Max’s story somewhat deflating. The novel constantly revolves around ideas of dependence and independence, stasis and change, the definite and the vague. In the end, we are still circling those poles, following a boyfriend and girlfriend who seem unwilling to let their relationship grow up." I have to agree. Another review noted that this novel might appeal most to Millennial readers. Perhaps I am just too far from that generation to get it.

[charlotte ✩ · Rating 4 out of 5]

The more time passes since I read this one, the more I find myself thinking about it.

The Maltese Version was my first Katy Simpson Smith’s novel but it definitely won’t be the last.

Character driven books, morally ambiguous characters and well done miscommunication are forever my favorite things in literary fiction and this one was full of all of these.

One of the things that’s always important to me is feeling a connection to the characters, which I did, but I cannot say it was a very strong one. However, the entire book had me so addicted I didn’t even care.

The writing was truly gorgeous, however it was at times slightly difficult to get through.

All I all while I had some issues, this was still a beautifully written novel with incredibly complex characters and the author did an amazing job at showing us the complicated relationships between them!!

If you love literary fiction, complex characters and character dynamics—you’ll absolutely love this one!

Huge thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for giving me an early copy of this book in exchange for my honest review!

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

“They were two adults on two paths, pretending it was one.”

“Her mother had told her the only surety in the world was from the Bible, and The Associated Press.”

There are plenty of great lines in this novel, many on the borders of communication between languages. Like “Possession,” this is about literary detection and also about love.

The delicious subtleties between Maltese and Italian and the diamond cutting to achieve its best version into English. How to preserve the passion, the meter if possible and the meaning? How assiduously are you yoked to the word by word meaning?

The ingredients: One couple - a freelance travel writer and a translator/teacher - comfortable in Chicago. The possibility of a baby. The man, with a commission to go to Malta to translate a poet there. Radio silence from him after he landed.

And the detective part.

[Jenny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Katy Simpson Smith isn't an author I was familiar with but after reading The Maltese Version I'd be interested to track down some of her earlier books. Anyone with an interest in the intricacies of literary translation will find much to enjoy here. Malta and Gozo and the culture and landscape of these Mediterranean islands are fascinating backdrops to this original and intriguing mystery

My thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for an advance review copy.

[Tracy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am a Katy Simpson Smith superfan, so whatever she writes, I’m going to eat up with a spoon. But this one, while different than her other books, is exactly like her other books: smart, intense, literary, stunning. It’s also accessible, sometimes funny, and better than the last book you read.

[Ilene G. Kelman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting. It was well written.