The Jukebox Queen of Malta

The Jukebox Queen of Malta is an exquisite and enchanting novel of love and war set on an island perilously balanced between what is real and what is not.



It's 1942 and Rocco Raven, an intrepid auto mechanic turned corporal from Brooklyn, has arrived in Malta, a Mediterranean island of Neolithic caves, Copper Age temples, and fortresses. The island is under siege, full of smoke and rubble, caught in the magnesium glare of German and Italian bombs.



But nothing is as it seems on Malta. Rocco's living quarters are a brothel; his commanding officer has a genius for turning the war's misfortunes into personal profit; and the Maltese people, astonishingly, testify to the resiliency of the human spirit. When Rocco meets the beautiful and ethereal Melita, who delivers the jukeboxes her cousin builds out of shattered debris, they are drawn to each other by an immediate passion. And, it is their full-blown affair that at once liberates and imprisons Rocco on the island.



In this mesmerizing novel, music and bombs, war and romance, the jukebox and the gun exist in arresting counterpoint in a story that is a profound and deeply moving exploration of the redemptive powers of love.

Contents

Part I: Rocco and Melita

April Blitz, 1942

1: Buy Lace -- Save Malta

2: The Bomb

3: A Night on the Gut

4: The Shelter

5: The House on Windmill Street

6: A Jukebox for Zarb Adami

7: Fingerly's Fat Lady

8: The Green Room

9: Miss Sicily Sings for Malta

10: Zammit

11: The Word for Snow

12: The Maltese Falcon

13: The Neolithic Cave

14: Poker at the Point de Vue

15: Walking Through Wall

Part II: Heat, Sun, Dust Over Everything

16: Zammit Discourses on the Intricacies of the Soul

Nardu Camilleri Gets a Haircut

Tony Zebra Goes for the Big Escape

17: The Pigmy Elephan

18: The First Day of the Bombing

19: The Glorious Tenth

20: Nigg

21: The Jukebox Madness of Zarb Adami

22: Prowling Through the Codes

23: The General Georg von Bismarck Memorial Baseball Game

24: The Fall of Tobruk

25: "Love Somebody, Yes I Do --

26: Aida's Wedding

Part III: Music in the Nigh

27: The Rhino Caress Transatlantic Condom Deal

28: The Last Rites of Dominic Mifsud

29: The Peacock and the Peahen

30: Miss Sicily

31: Bean Code, Bean Code

32: Pinpoints of Light Dancing All Around Him

33: Melita Humming

34: Rommel on the Run

35: Nardu Camilleri Speaks of Love

World News Roundup/General Patton in Morocco

Christina's Seething Simmering Malta Conga Line

36: Zed Mir Min

37: The November Convoy

38: Zammit's Mother-of-God Madonna Jukebox

Epilouge: 1945

Malta is most particularly a country where history has had to be reinvented continuously....Each generation makes its spasmodic attacks on the subterranean mysteries, and each emerges with its own story; but with each discovery the mysteries take on another aspect and require the story to be retold.

-- Nigel Dennis, An Essay on Malta

"Malta of gold, Malta of silver, Malta of precious metal,

We shall never take you!

No, not even if you were as soft as a gourd,

Not even if you were only protected by an onion skin!"

And from her ramparts a voice replied:

"I am she who has decimated the galleys of the Turk

And all the warriors of Constantinople and Galata!"

-- Anonymous, Sixteenth Century

Under repeated fire from the skies, Malta stood alone...in the center of the sea, one tiny bright flame in the darkness, a beacon of hope for the clearer days which have come.

-- Franklin D. Roosevelt