Castillo (Arabic)

When Amanda’s father dies, she feels compelled to visit Emma, the mother who abandoned her when she was still a child. Now with a family of her own, it feels urgent to Amanda that she investigate the silence surrounding her mother leaving, but also the death of her mother’s twin sister Cathy, a.k.a. K. Penza, the cult author of the Inspector Castillo crime novels, who was killed by a bomb during the violent and murky political climate of Malta in the 1980s.

Clare Azzopardi’s meta-detective novel irresistibly weaves the sleuthing of Amanda and Inspector Castillo, inviting the reader to unmask the real Cathy, Catherine, Kitty, K. Penza. This novel is many things, but at its root is a desire to express the ever-relevant – and now sadly ever-topical – helplessness we feel when faced with endemic corruption and apparently sanctified violence [ . . . ]

-Teodor Reljic

Clare Azzopardi's Castillo is as complex as each individual reader may make of a writerly novel. Not only its themes, but also plot lines sometimes overlap in a way that might make it appear fragmentary to some, but amazingly skilful to others. It may be approached from various angles - its plot's schema, its psychological portrayal and relationships, of mainly familial characters, its study of motherhood, the correlation between Cathy's stories and the background and timespan the novel is set in, etc.

-Maria Grech Ganado

Castillo was published in English by Praspar Press (trans. Albert Gatt); in Arabic by El Maraya (trans. Abdelrehim Youssef); in Italian by Mesogea (trans. Virginia Monteforte). It was also made into a play and a full-length film by Take Two.

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