Eight books that put you in Malta. Seven are by writers from Malta and set there, starting with The Lives and Deaths of K. Penza and The Information Officer. The other is a wider pick, by someone who knows the place well.
Malta's oldest known poem, the Cantilena, dates from the late fifteenth century and is the earliest surviving text in Maltese. Maltese and English are the official languages, but writers in Maltese have a small home readership and few of their books have been translated into English.
More are now appearing: Clare Azzopardi's The Lives and Deaths of K. Penza is a crime story set during the political violence of the 1980s, and Loranne Vella's Before the Rocket imagines the island in 2064. Oliver Friggieri's The Lie and Jasmine Blossoms for All Time portray village and neighbourhood life. Immanuel Mifsud writes about his father and about being a father. In A Death in Malta, Paul Caruana Galizia tells of his mother's murder. Nicholas Monsarrat's The Kappillan of Malta and Mark Mills's The Information Officer are set during the bombing of the Second World War.
A woman looks into the 1980s bomb death of her aunt, a crime writer, in a story that mixes her search with extracts from the aunt's detective novels, set against Malta's political violence.
A thriller in which a British propaganda officer hunts a killer of local women during the 1942 bombing of Malta.
A short autobiographical work in which the author thinks about his late father, a policeman, and about his own role as a father, against the background of 20th-century Malta.
The son of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia tells the story of her life and her 2017 murder, and of his family's fight for accountability in Malta.
After the death of his grandmother, a photographer, Petrel returns to Malta in 2064, where the island is occupied, damaged by climate change and used as a base for space flights, and he looks into her past.
Characters remember and imagine life in a Maltese neighbourhood in the 1950s, as its traditional way of life fades.
An unhappily married man in a small Maltese village leaves his wife for another woman and is trapped by gossip and village morals.
By long-time residents and outsiders who know the place well, or folk tales, poetry and history with a strong feel for Malta.
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A novel of a village priest and his people through the Second World War bombing, showing Maltese Catholic life and endurance under siege.
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