Contrary to what contemporary hagiography like the Noonday Salute at the Upper Barrakka would have us believe, the times under the British were no easy times.

Coming out from the Order’s oppressive, claustrophobic, fundamentalist rule, the Maltese thought that the British would be better. Better too than the free-wheeling, iconoclastic, grasping, French.

When King Tom replaced Alexander Ball, who had championed the Maltese cause in the fight against the French, the Maltese belatedly realized that they had chosen a protector and a colonial power whose interest in Malta was to use Malta as a staging post, as a link in the maritime link from Gib to Port Said and thence to India.

Malta soon became a big barracks with more and more soldiers being billeted or passing through on their way to India or vice-versa.

This slim book is not the story of a Maltese man, although his name, Leo Bonanno, maybe thought by some to be completely Maltese.

This is a Sicilian young man, who poverty and oppression pushed out of his native Sicily in 1806 to come to Malta and enlist in a special regiment within the British Army in Malta.

Here he found both good and bad things.

The good thing is mainly the love of Lisa, a girl from the nearby Kalkara, a very typical Maltese girl from those times.

The bad thing is the inflexible and terrible discipline within the British Army.

When, as in this case, something goes wrong and Leo becomes considered by the British Army a rebel and a deserter, all the force of the British colonial power is turned against him and no love from Lisa can save him.

The book says this is a ‘novel inspired by true events’. Perhaps that angle of Maltese history has never been really studied and explained.