Books
The Night Birds
byThomas Maltman
"Maltman's prose and pacing flow from an expert hand. His gaze is unflinching and balanced...while there is much loss in the novel, in the end there is salvation." Full review » —The Denver Post
"[W]e all set our sights on the Great American Novel...[and Maltman] comes impressively close to laying his hands on the grail...wonderfully nuanced...beautifully expressed." Full review » —The Boston Globe
"[L]uminously written and harrowing." —Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"[A] gripping and detailed tapestry of German settler and Dakota ethnography, legend, myth, and reality that recreates this oft overlooked period in American history." —Minneapolis City Pages
The summer of 1876 is a time of fear and uncertainty for young Asa Senger and his German immigrant family. Vast clouds of locusts descend once more on the Great Plains, stripping the land bare. The James-Younger gang, a band of murderous thieves, is rumored to be riding north into the area. And all the while, Asa can sense lurking just under the surface of his daily life something which terrifies his parents into silence.
Then his Aunt Hazel, confined for years in an asylum, arrives, bearing with her stories about the Dakota Conflict of 1862. Her arrival will propel the story into the past, as far back as the Senger family's initial settlement in slave-holding Missouri, a place of superstition and folklore. Interweaving Grimm tales, the abolitionist movement, country healers and water-witches, as well as Dakota ethnography and heritage, she tells the story of their epic journey.
Past and present intertwine in this lyrical narrative, as Asa discovers that violence cannot stay buried and every secret bears a cost. The past, Asa is about to find out, is as close as his own heartbeat.
Praise
The Night Birds, soars and sings like a feathered angel, its song the history of the Sioux uprising in southwestern Minnesota in 1862, an event lost in the smoke of history as the rest of the nation had its hands full with the War Between the States...rich...stunning...it should be listened to, its words allowed to take wing before coming to rest in your heart.-The Chicago Sun Times
Maltman's liquid prose paints a complete picture of the settlement of the Midwest. Though the book is a novel, not a history, it's a remarkably poignant narrative in time, an elegant portrayal of a period little known in American history.-Rocky Mountain News
The novel weaves effortlessly back and forth in time, chronicling the lives of the Sengers and the Dakotas, whose fate is tied to their own. Thanks to Maltman's gift for storytelling, we, too, can learn about the pain of this forgotten era. Full review »-St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Set in the 1860s and '70s, Maltman's superb debut evokes a Midwest lacerated by clashes between European and Native American, slaveowner and abolitionist, killer and healer, nature and culture…Maltman excels at giving even his most harrowing scenes an understated realism and at painting characters who are richly, sometimes disturbingly, human. The novel sustains its tension right to the moment it ends-Publishers Weekly Starred Review
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Coming Soon!
Little Wolves
a novel by Thomas Maltman
Thomas Maltman's second novel, Little Wolves, is a contemporary mystery that takes place in the same prairie country as The Night Birds. Stay tuned to this website for further announcements.