The Maltese Version
By Katy Simpson Smith
FSG Originals/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, August 18, 2026
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.
Praise for The Weeds
“[A] lyrical incisive novel . . . [about] a changing climate, the invisibility of women’s work, and the perseverance of unofficial histories.” —The New Yorker
“A vivid, compelling tale . . . The sheer beauty of Smith’s prose . . . alternates passages of lush lyricism with moments of epigrammatic bluntness. [And] Smith proves as adept at building suspense as any thriller writer.” —Clarion Ledger
“Smith combines botany and the Roman Colosseum to tell a riveting story.”
—Shondaland
“A lyrical dive into . . . loss, defiance, and need, told through the stamens, leaves, and petals of flowers and weeds.” —New Orleans magazine
“A furious, beautiful book about the quest for knowledge and women’s part in that quest, as well as a passionate reminder that the struggle for women’s rights is ongoing.” —The Times-Picayune
“The Weeds is the kind of novel that’s like Halley’s Comet—something of its kind appears infrequently, but when it does, it leaves a significant impression.”
—Southern Review of Books
“Irresistible . . . The dangerous potential inside every desire, every choice, drives the suspense in this engrossing novel.” —Emily Choate, Chapter 16
“Luminous . . . A lyrical meditation on power, need, and love.”
—Kirkus, starred review
“Marvelous . . . Shows a real power of storytelling . . . A wonderful book . . . [that’s] bound to find a place in your memory whenever you see a clump of rosemary.”
—Virginia Living
“Laced with existential musing and dark humor . . . We begin to understand why these two women are here, in an ancient place where there is blood still deep in the sand, and, more importantly, what they are going to do about it.”
—The Historical Novels Review
“Full of wonders and history and secrets . . . Impressive.”
—Bookpage, starred review
“Garden lovers will delight in this roving, fascinating novel that follows a Mississippi woman who discovers the unexpectedly rich plant world of the Roman Colosseum. Wanderlust: induced!” —Garden & Gun
“Erudite, playful, and filled with fury about gender inequality, [The Weeds] can be recommended to readers of cli-fi and feminist literary fiction.” —Booklist
“[A] centuries-spanning story . . . Katy Simpson Smith muses on the constraints and choices of women trying simply to survive.” —Literary Hub
“Ingenious . . . Potent details bring [The Weeds] to vibrant life . . . Readers will enjoy stopping to smell the clematis.” —Publishers Weekly
“A novel that repurposes the old-school botanical survey as a way of sorting through curiosity and desire in their rawest forms, set against the high-romantic backdrop of the Roman Colosseum in plant-strewn, crumbling ruin.” —Literary Hub
“[A] subtle, intelligent work.” —Library Journal
“Brilliant, poetic, unnerving, wholly original. What else would you expect from Katy Simpson Smith? With The Weeds, she has written another masterpiece.”
—Julia Phillips, author of Disappearing Earth
“The Weeds is the story of secrets in plain sight—plants in the cracks of a monument, women’s lives rooted in spaces that provide them no sunlight or water—but this novel is anything but quiet or secretive. It is explosive and prismatic. I will be recommending this novel to everyone forever.” —Ramona Ausubel, author of The Last Animal
“A beautiful, strange, and compelling novel. I liked it for its playfulness about history, for its embrace of bodies in place, for its sense of doom and weirdness at loose in the world. I kept wanting my friends to read it so we could talk about it.”
—Sarah Moss, author of The Fell
“What a terrific novel! Strange, moving, and marvelously alive, The Weeds works—like the eponymous flora that fill its pages—with subtle insistence and exuberant power to unfurl its ingeniously twinned stories of injustice, heartbreak, desire, and hope. I couldn’t put it down.” —Laird Hunt, author of Zorrie
“Intricately written, combining lush prose, deep insights, and a wicked sense of humor, The Weeds is an irresistible reading experience. Katy Simpson Smith is a wholly original voice with talent to spare.”
—Jami Attenberg, author of I Came All This Way to Meet You
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.
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