'My father killed my mother. How do you talk about that?'

Times Talk by Times of Malta

When Karl Schembri was a boy, his father carried a dark and unspoken history – years of sexual abuse at the hands of a priest.

The trauma left deep scars, and as an adult, his father’s mind began to unravel. The voices that haunted him eventually drove him to commit an unthinkable act: the murder of Schembri’s mother.

Schembri, an author, journalist and activist, has now finally broken a decades-long silence through his new novel Eħlisna mid-Deni (Deliver us from Evil).

He tells Times Talk the book - a work of fiction inspired by his real story - is his way of achieving justice for a human tragedy that the authorities systematically overlooked for years.