Books from Malta

A Taste of Maltese Folklore by Joseph C. Camilleri surveys the customs, beliefs, and everyday practices that have shaped life on the Maltese islands. The book covers folk architecture, traditional clothing, local foods, crafts, and superstitions, drawing from rural traditions that developed over centuries on a small but culturally layered archipelago in the central Mediterranean.

Malta sits at a crossroads between Europe and North Africa, and its folklore reflects influences from Phoenician, Arab, Norman, and British periods of rule. Camilleri organizes this material in short, illustrated sections, making topics like harvest rituals, stone building methods, and household remedies easy to follow without specialist background. The approach is descriptive rather than academic, aimed at readers encountering Maltese tradition for the first time as well as those already familiar with the islands.

Several of the customs described in the book belong to a generation now passing from living memory. Village feast preparations, seasonal food traditions, and beliefs about luck and protection are recorded here alongside visual details of tools, dress, and decoration that once defined daily routines across Gozo and Malta.

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Everyday Encounters is a collection of short stories by John P. Portelli, a Maltese author. The stories focus on brief, charged moments in ordinary life: flashes of happiness, loss, embarrassment, and hope. Rather than building long arcs, Portelli works in compact scenes drawn from social interactions that most people would recognize from their own experience.

The collection moves between contrasting emotional states. One story may center on resentment, the next on kindness; one on irreverence, another on something close to grace. Portelli treats these shifts as a natural part of how people actually live, where a single encounter at a shop counter or a family table can carry more weight than months of routine. The writing stays direct and conceptually precise, favoring clarity over ornament.

The stories are rooted in everyday settings and situations, yet the characters and their small decisions carry real complexity. Portelli is interested in the gap between how ordinary a moment looks from the outside and how significant it feels to the person inside it. The collection was published in Malta, where Portelli is based.

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After returning from his father's funeral, the narrator opens a diary his father kept as a soldier during the Second World War. The entries are sparse and almost impersonal, recording days with little emotion. That restraint unsettles the son and sends him back through decades of memory, searching for moments when his father's carefully maintained toughness might have cracked.

The father the narrator knew was not the young soldier of the diary but a man left disabled by a motorcycle accident. He insisted on presenting himself as strong enough to bear any hardship, and he raised his son by the same standard. The book moves between wartime fragments and domestic scenes, tracing how ideas about manhood pass from one generation to the next.

Revisiting episodes from his own childhood and upbringing, the narrator examines how he was taught to become a man, and looks for the signs of feeling his father worked to conceal. Immanuel Mifsud received the 2011 European Union Prize for Literature for this book, the first time the award went to a Maltese writer.

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Let Fair Weather Bring Me Home is set on Malta in the 1930s, when the island was still a British colony. The story takes place around the Grand Harbour, where British naval fleets were stationed for over a century. Against this backdrop of foreign rule and local tradition, Oliver Friggieri follows a small group of characters whose lives are shaped by the customs and rigid social expectations of their community.

At the center of the novel is a mother separated from her son, who was born outside marriage and raised in a Roman Catholic Church institution. Their reunion forms one strand of the plot. Another follows a priest who returns to Malta after years away, his reputation at last cleared of earlier accusations. Both storylines explore how deeply institutions, whether colonial, religious, or social, can mark individual lives on a small island where privacy is scarce and memory is long.

Friggieri uses Malta's size and its particular mix of Mediterranean Catholic culture and British colonial presence to examine prejudice, shame, and the slow erosion of beliefs once considered permanent. The Grand Harbour setting anchors the story in a real and specific place where military ships and parish churches occupied the same narrow coastline.

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Malta sits in the central Mediterranean between Sicily and the North African coast, and its cooking reflects centuries of contact with Arab, French, Italian, and English traditions. Simon Bajada, whose earlier work includes cookbooks on Nordic cuisine, turns his attention to this small archipelago and its distinctive food culture. The book contains around 70 recipes designed for home cooks, drawing on everyday Maltese ingredients and methods rather than restaurant-style presentation.

Among the dishes covered are Ftira, a flattened sourdough bread topped with tomato, tuna, capers, and olives; Aljotta, a fish stew built on local seafood; and Bigilla, a paste made from broad beans and served as a dip. These recipes reflect a kitchen shaped by both sea and land, combining coastal produce with the agrarian staples of a rocky island landscape. The book is heavily illustrated with photography that documents the islands alongside the food.

Bajada's approach focuses on accessible technique and local balance rather than elaborate preparation. The recipes sit within a broader portrait of Maltese daily life, connecting dishes to the places and routines they belong to on the islands.

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By the middle of the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire under Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent reached from western Asia through southeastern Europe and into North Africa. Linking those territories, and opening a path toward western Europe, meant controlling the central Mediterranean. The small island of Malta, lying between Sicily and the North African coast, sat directly across that route.

Malta was held by the Knights of St. John, a military religious order that had received the island from the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1530. In 1565 a large Ottoman fleet and army arrived. Ernle Bradford reconstructs the months that followed in close detail, tracing bombardment, assault, and defence across the island's harbours and a chain of small stone forts.

The fighting ran from May to September, with tens of thousands of Ottoman troops facing outnumbered knights and Maltese defenders. Bradford works through the strategies of both sides, the supply problems, the terrain, and the human cost, and sets the siege inside the longer sixteenth-century contest between Ottoman and Christian powers for command of Mediterranean sea routes and the trade and troop movements they carried.

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Nicholas Monsarrat's novel is set on the island of Malta during the Second World War, when the archipelago endured one of the longest and most concentrated aerial bombardments of the conflict. At its center is Father Salvatore, a parish priest, or kappillan, who serves the poor in his community. As the bombing intensifies and buildings collapse across the island, he finds himself sheltering displaced civilians in underground catacombs exposed by the explosions.

The narrative is structured around six specific days during the siege, each revealing a different stage of the ordeal faced by the Maltese population. Father Salvatore tends to people who have lost their homes, gone without food, and been driven underground by the relentless air raids. In the catacombs he offers what comfort he can, speaking to the frightened crowds and trying to hold a fragile sense of order together. The novel traces both his personal experience and the broader fate of the island as a whole.

Monsarrat, best known for his sea novels, spent time in Malta and drew on the island's wartime history for this book. The story treats the daily realities of siege life with close physical detail, from the damage above ground to the crowded conditions below.

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Uncommon Malta and Gozo is a travel guide and travelogue compiled by Emma Mattei. It covers both the main island of Malta and its smaller northern neighbor Gozo, moving between urban streets and coastal paths. The book combines practical tools like maps, routes, and itineraries with anecdotes, local lore, myths, and field notes, positioning itself somewhere between a standard guidebook and a personal journal of place.

The project draws on multiple contributors, including both long-term residents and visitors, established writers and newer voices. This mix gives the book a layered perspective on the islands rather than a single narrator's point of view. Mattei frames the approach around what the book calls a habit of flux, encouraging wandering and unplanned detours over fixed sightseeing schedules. Illustrations accompany the text alongside the route information.

Malta and Gozo together cover roughly 316 square kilometers, a small area that nonetheless holds thousands of years of layered settlement, from Neolithic temple builders to Knights of St. John to British colonial administration. The book's structure treats this density as an advantage, suggesting that getting slightly lost in such a compact landscape is one reliable way to encounter something unexpected.

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