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

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 translating poetry from a language he seems barely to know.

Ana, the poet, moves through the house her father filled with his paintings, the house where her mother struggled to survive. Ana guards her poems closely. Can she let this foreign man take her words, her art, into his tongue? Does every partnership require some form of surrender?

Then Max blinks off the map, and Leonie asks Rhoda—an expert travel writer—to track him down in Malta, where a sun-baked wildness undermines Rhoda’s sense of reality. What kind of caper is unfolding? And what will Rhoda 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