Camerata!, the new novel by Aleks Farrugia, is available for sale on the stand of SKS Publishers at the Malta Book Festival 2021.

Camerata! was recently launched at the Valletta Design Cluster and is the second of Aleks Farrugia’s publications with SKS. His first, Għall-Glorja tal-Patrija, won the National Book Prize 2020.

Camerata! is what Farrugia calls a quasi-detective novel set in the 1930s. Introducing Inspector Salvu Camilleri, an unconventional and volatile character with his own demons to fight, Camerata! is a novel about corruption and betrayal, about silences and lies, about misplaced ambitions and mistakes that mark a man’s life.

The novel has already attracted the critics’ attention.

Poet and academic Norbert Bugeja said that Camerata! reminds him “in instances of Stendhal, Eco and Chandler, while Farrugia always retains his own voice and style”.

He said: “the novel keeps you constantly on your toes, and at times makes you doubt whether you are reading the pages of a book or those from your life.”

Prof. John Portelli, poet and educator, calls Farrugia “a refined writer of substance, with a masterly grasp of the Maltese language”. Camerata! is “a most intriguing novel, populated with energetic and lively characters, well-wrought biting dialogues, reflecting the mentalities of corruption, passion and the struggle for truth and justice”.

Critic and lecturer David Aloisio considers Camerata! as an “effective exercise of retrospection as much as an opportunity for the readers to reflect on our current social reality.”

Camerata! is available at the Book Festival, after which it will also be available in local bookshops as well as online from the website skspublishers.com.