A novel which can be read in any order is being launched by SKS Publishers.

The launch of Alfred Sant’s Bħal f’Dizzjunarju (As in a Dictionary) ties in with the annual local book fair between November 10 and 13.

Bħal f’Dizzjunarju is the first novel in Maltese that can be read in any order, so one can start it and continue reading at any point.

Whether one takes it up at the opening or at midpoint will make no difference when following the storyline. The novel hitches the life of the main character Anġlu Debono to a carousel of memories and episodes placed one after the other in a sequence like they were coming out of a dictionary.

Bħal f’Dizzjunarju follows the life and career of Debono over 40 years. The reader is by his side during some of the most disturbing episodes of his childhood.

We follow him on travels to Rome and London among others, on work assignments and on holiday. With him, we tramp through crowds of noisy people getting drunk, band music and a blistering sun during a morning feast parade in the middle of summer.

There are career and family problems. With Debono, the reader remembers or gets to know some of the developments in Malta since Independence, but this happens on the side for Debono always preferred to keep away from polemics.

All he wanted to do was to live life his way, while spending time and devoting himself to his major pursuit: writing.

In 1968, Sant’s first novel,L-Ewwel Weraq tal-Bajtar (The First Leaves of the Figtree), caused controversy as a novel of protest and described Malta’s traditional society as experienced by the young people of those days.

At the start of the 1980s, his novel Bejgħ u Xiri (Buying and Selling) pioneered as a business novel but got noticed for a no-holds-barred description of a violent rape scene. Sant’s most recent two books are the novel The Iscariot Field and the collection of tales Pupu fil-Baħar/Doll in the Water.