As the heatwaves rippled across Europe, one summer novel held me gripped. It comes from Foundry Editions, an indie publisher set up in 2023 to champion literature from around the Mediterranean and notable, like fellow leading internationalist houses Fitzcarraldo and And Other Stories, for their distinctive covers (in this case designed to capture the visual heritage of the region they celebrate).
I’ve been a fan of theirs for some time, ever since reading the second title they published: the extraordinary Your Little Matter by Maria Grazia Calandrone, translated from the Italian by Antonella Lettieri. Now, I’ve fallen for their fifteenth book: You Know the Sun Bothers Me by Maltese writer and visual artist Ryan Falzon, translated by Joe Gatt.
The novel captures the unnamed thirty-year-old narrator’s struggles to fill the summer months after he finishes schoolteaching for the year. Bored and frustrated, and still living with his parents, he spends his days drinking, sleeping and tinkering with old cars, while obsessing over Sarah, a volatile artist he met online, who oscillates between love-bombing and ghosting him.
One of this book’s many masterful aspects is that it makes inaction compelling. We watch the narrator frittering his summer away with baited breath. The short chapters are devilishly moreish, prompting us to guzzle them in much the same way the narrator consumes alcohol.
This is partly down to the novel’s distinctive voice. Through Gatt, Falzon sustains a fascinating, vulnerable and thrawn patter that manages to move from dry humour to pathos in a handful of sentences. We chuckle at the descriptions of the protagonist’s colleagues – the careers adviser, for example, who can’t use a computer and retires every year – and shiver at the bleakness of the self-loathing that drives him to self-sabotage repeatedly. Although the self-deprecation is occasionally a little heavy-handed, making one or two notes predictable, the overall effect is rich and engrossing. I was particularly struck by the depiction of paranoia the night the narrator smokes cannabis.
Recognition is another important part of this book’s success. Anyone who owns a smartphone will find things that resonate in its pages: it is one of the best novels about online life I’ve ever read – on par with the International Booker Prize shortlisted Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated by Sophie Hughes. Not only does it portray numerous aspects of using the internet breathtakingly accurately – from the etiquette of tagging and swiping right to the shame of loitering on social media waiting for likes, and the anxiety and endorphin rushes provoked by instant messaging – but it shows how these things seep into and reorder our consciousness, making distraction a default.
This works even at the sentence level, with the narrative often coming to us in fragments, and sometimes in lists of impressions that veer between the lyricism of poems and the prosaicism of listicles. Occasionally, it dissolves into chains of similes, conveying a sense of reality as slippery and malleable, forever just beyond our grasp.
Yet You Know the Sun Bothers Me is also locally distinctive. Malta is a character in this book, in all her maddening, charming, parochial glory. The Maltese language is folded liberally through the text, with Gatt taking the wise decision not to italicise or translate terms such as ‘pjazza’, ‘marċ’ and ‘każin’, but rather to leave them for readers to make their own accommodations with, so that we come to the story rather than having it delivered to us. The narrator vents liberally over his frustrations at the economic and social pressures that see him trapped in pseudo-adolescence, living like a teenager past his sell-by date in his parents’ house.
And of course, there’s Sarah, a formidable, fascinating and infuriating creation, who, like the protagonist, we grow to love and hate. I found resonance with some other excellent depictions of toxic relationships here – particularly in Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Michael Hofmann, and Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. Interestingly, though, all the comparable renderings of such dynamics that sprang to my mind involved manipulative male characters. Falzon’s Sarah is the only instance I can readily think of a woman in this role. (Do let me know if other examples occur to you in the comments below.)
Overall, this novel is a masterclass in putting psychology on the page. It shows how we twist reality and in so doing become complicit in our failures. With its deft depiction of the way virtual life rewires our thinking, it reveals how we may be remaking our minds in the internet’s image. And with its compelling portrayal of inaction and distraction, it delivers a thoroughly absorbing read. Heartily recommended.
You Know the Sun Bothers Me by Ryan Falzon, translated from the Maltese by Joe Gatt (Foundry Editions, 2026)
