Malta, Heathcliff the Musical, Int'l Booker, Posey Rings & More: Endnotes 27 February

Every Friday, we celebrate the weekend — and all the reading and relaxing and daydreaming time ahead — with Melissa's favorite book- and travel-related links of the week. Why work when you can read fun stuff?!

This post is part of our Endnotes series.

That colorful quay above is in Marsaxlokk, a fishing village in Malta, just south of the capital city of Valletta. With 300 days of sunshine per year — and a friendly hum of locals, fishermen, and tourists — it’s a delicious, sun-drenched, chill place to start exploring Malta. CN Traveler says it’s one of the best things to do in Malta, and National Geographic recommends you make it part of a weekend visit to the island. Marsaxlokk is famous for its boats: the luzzu and the kajjik, both painted in rainbow colors and adorned with the eye of Horus — or eye of Osiris — to protect against dangers at sea. Every Sunday, fishermen bring their catch to a bustling market right on the quay; the other days of the week, the market is a fun place for visits to buy the local liqueur (bajtra, made from prickly pears), honey, Maltese lace (bizzilla), and hand-painted ceramics. Here’s a nice video walk through the market. You could also swim and snorkel in St. Peters Pool, or explore the prehistoric Ghar Dalam Cave (aka, the Cave of Darkness). Want to wander further afield? Here are 12 beautiful places to visit in Malta and tips from CN Traveler for 48 hours in Valletta.

• Oooh, the 2026 International Booker Prize longlist is out! ‘From witchcraft to war, revolution to renewal, magic to murder – and ranging in size from pocket-friendly to doorstopper – this year’s longlisted books travel across continents and centuries.’

• Laurens Groff’s writing process is… unusual. She writes longhand in spiral notebooks, working on multiple books at a time. Then, when she has a first draft, she locks it in a box and never reads it again. To write the next draft, she works from memory, recreating her story in longhand again. This is bananas to me, but it clearly works. More on Groff and her new story collection here. (I love her novel The Monsters of Templeton.)

• Read an excerpt from Divine Ruin by Margot Douaihy, featuring a ‘clever, acerbic, chainsmoking nun’ who solves crimes. CrimeReads says, ‘The city of New Orleans is as much a main character as Douaihy’s nun, and the interplay between setting and character shines throughout the novel.’

• ‘I watched Heathcliff The Musical so you don’t have to.’ One of our favorite book YouTubers, Sinead Hanna, breaks down the rock opera adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel. It’s maybe even worse than you think.

• 25 famous TV and film locations you can visit in the UK. From Shakespeare to the zombies of 28 Years Later, these are the country houses, cliffs, moors, villages, and castles immortalized on screen.

• This will make you feel nice (and hungry for plantains): The Life-Saving Power of Chess, With a Side of Plantains. Come for the camaraderie, stay for phrases like ‘the residue of crackly griot, pikliz, and tostones.’

• Treat yourself to this interview with Amy Spalding, author of a YA romance I love — The Reece Malcolm List — and many other wonderful things, including her new book In Her Spotlight (‘a hilarious, sweetly sexy, gloriously relatable, second chance, sapphic rom-com’).

• Time travel back to 1200. ‘It was the era of quests, chivalry, and chaste devotion. Love tokens — especially gold rings — were much in vogue. About this time, an unknown jeweller had the brilliant idea of engraving the outside of his gold rings with a few well-chosen words, thus launching a trend that would last for more than 600 years.’ Read all about posey rings.

• Myth, monsters and making sense of a disenchanted world: why everyone is reading fantasy. ‘Fantasy understands that to undertake the risks of love is to venture beyond safety, into landscapes strange to you, on perilous and wonderful journeys.’

• Related: The upcoming novel Nonesuch by Francis Spufford is a ‘a dazzling wartime fantasy’ and ‘popcorny delight’ that combines dark magic, fascism, and romance in blitz-stricken London.

Wishing you sunshine, even if it’s only in your heart.

Top image courtesy of Calin Stan/Unsplash.