As the heatwaves rippled across Europe, one summer novel held me gripped. 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. Through Gatt, Falzon sustains a fascinating, vulnerable and thrawn patter that manages to move from dry humour to pathos in a handful of sentences. You Know the Sun Bothers Me by Ryan Falzon, translated from the Maltese by Joe Gatt (Foundry Editions, 2026)Like this: Like Loading…