“Toni Tanti has left a marriage and a busy career, hoping for a stress-free life of solitude in his old Sliema flat. Tragedy strikes, and over the course of a few October days, Toni’s life − and the entire island of Malta − is thrown into turmoil. But with tragedy comes clarity, and Toni is about to discover what his restless mind has been searching for.”
Sunset Exiles
(February 2025; Merlin Publishers)
In the afterglow of last month’s launch, we ask Camilleri about his inspiration, his writing process and what his writing future holds now.
What inspired you to write a novel, and how did the idea first take shape?
My first writing and publication experience was a collection of short stories, non-fiction (Strangers I’ll Never Forget, Ede Books, 2021), but the idea of a novel has always fascinated me, and it was what I dreamed of writing. I think it’s quite special to attempt to create an entire world, populate it with complex characters, and create a story that keeps readers engaged while reaching a satisfying conclusion. I had no novel-worthy ideas when I first sat down to write, during the first months of the pandemic, but within a year or so, the story started to coalesce.
Like many first novels, there’s a lot of me in Toni, the protagonist of Sunset Exiles, whose thoughts and dreams sometimes mirror my own. I’ve been lucky to experience many memorable adventures in my life so far, including on a romantic level, so I was able to draw on those when mapping out the love story in the middle section of the book, as well as Toni’s back-story. My work as a GP also offers fertile ground for human stories, so I reaped a few from there, making sure to make them anonymous.
What was the biggest surprise or challenge you faced while writing this novel?
Back in July 2022, when I typed The End, I thought the hard work was done. I was very wrong! I have since learnt that the first draft is important, yes, but if often looks very different from the end product.
In November 2023, I had copy-pasted many, many comments from early readers and fellow writers into a document. I was putting off implementing them because some of them felt like too much hard work, but deep down I knew they were good advice. I also knew I needed to write new scenes, rather than just rearrange what I had already written. I took 10 days off work, booked into a cold and wet Airbnb in The Hague, looking out over Scheveningen beach, and sat there to perform major surgery on the manuscript. It was a beautiful experience, and it also seemed very natural for one of the new scenes to take place right there, on the pier that I could see from my rain-splattered window.
And thanks to all that feedback, my ideas my own changing with time, and mostly just paying closer attention to the structures of novels that I was reading, I was able to see how to reshape my story. I added early clues, clarified timelines, strengthened certain scenes, and also wove in flashbacks so that it makes sense to the reader, and also follows certain ingrained rules about storytelling.
How do you hope readers will connect with the story, and what do you want them to take away from it?
As exciting and passionate as young love stories may be, with Romeos climbing up balconies and Janes defying the odds to marry Rochesters, I think that older, more complex love stories can be far more interesting, and personally I enjoy them more. When there’s history, and maybe jealousy, and wariness, and the all-important baggage, love can be hard work. However, the rewards are even greater because, as in all areas of life, we know ourselves and what we want better as the decades go by. That’s why I wanted to write a love story that happens between two scarred, life-weary people, and show that it can still be life-altering, if one accepts it without cynicism and looks ahead.
What’s next for you as an author? Are you already working on your next book?
I’ve been collecting stories and interesting moments from my GP work for over a decade now, and I sometimes post them online under the hashtag ‘confessions of a Maltese GP’. I’ve known all along that the third book would be that, in some form. The content is all there, but now that book two is out in the world, I will finally sit down (maybe somewhere rainy, with a sea view), and see how to shape those stories into an exciting novel.
