Author: Salv Sammut
Publishers: Horizons / 2017
Extent: 389pp

Jasmin is a Maltese girl, as the story begins, who is seriously studying music (she plays the viola) and whose ambition is to enter the Malta Philharmonic Orchestra.

One day, taking a short cut, her car conks out and she is forced to knock on the door of the only house she can see in the pouring rain.

The owner of the house is a very strange foreigner who allows her to phone for an assistance vehicle very reluctantly. But while waiting she notices he has many distinguished-looking certificates on the walls. Her curiosity is piqued.

Thus begins a very strange relationship between the ambitious, if somewhat naïve girl and the strange professor.

Eventually, the initial hostility on the part of the professor mellows somewhat and things get to be on a level keel.

But the professor hides a secret, which he reveals only to a diary he starts to keep - a diary going back to his parents and their Russian origin and to the crisis that forced him to abandon his native Poland and seek refuge in Malta.

This is the core of the novel and to reveal more would be to give the story away.

As in the other novels by the author, some of which I have reviewed, the language is simple and flowing and the story becomes quite engrossing.

I have still not got quite acquainted with the new Maltese way of writing. For instance, in the very first page we find orkot when I thought the word would be spelt ghorkot.

But mistakes, if this is one, are very few and far between.