“The Night Birds is a dark and soaring evocation of a lost chapter of American history. Like Russell Banks in Cloudsplitter and Charles Frazier in Thirteen Moons, Thomas Maltman transports readers into a bitter, impassioned past with beautiful prose and unforgettably human characters. This book is a heart-wrenching ballad of the Great Plains.”
—Alyson Hagy, Keeneland |
“Maltman’s language shimmers. He creates a world both gritty and mythical, and he faces what is surely one of the most important yet too-often-ignored episodes in United States history with an astonishing degree of learning and understanding…. Startling, bracing, astonishing—and very real.”
—Kent Meyers, The Work of Wolves |
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The summer of 1876 feels like the end of the world to fourteen-year-old Asa Senger. Locusts plague the prairie farms; his family is about to lose everything. The Dakota Indians have been banished from Minnesota, yet an aged Indian appears. Asa’s father, the sheriff, jails him, counting on a bounty payment, but Asa is somehow compelled to free the old man, and must bear this guilt. The James-Younger gang, preparing to rob Northfield, stops at their farmhouse. What has propelled them into his life?
In this time of fear, another mysterious visitor appears, an aunt who has been confined to an asylum for years. Asa’s mother wants nothing to do with her; his father welcomes her. And Asa learns that his identity is bound up in a lost history, The Great Sioux Uprising, which everyone else wants to forget. Prefigured by the twin ravens Hunin and Munin—Memory and Understanding—from his dead grandfather’s treasured Grimm’s fairy tales, Asa learns that the past is as close as his own heartbeat. Without understanding that past he can neither know who he is, nor who he may become.
THOMAS MALTMAN'S essays, poetry, and fiction have been published in the Georgetown Review, Great River Review, and Main Channel Voices, among other journals. He has a BA from Eastern Washington University and an MFA from Minnesota State University, Mankato and currently teaches creative writing and literature at Silver Lake College in Manitowoc, Wisconsin.
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