Night Birds
A catastrophe on a mountain in Transylvania sends toxic cyanide hurtling through rivers and streams, destroying an ecosystem and killing hundreds. As the impact of the mining breach stretches beyond the country’s borders, it ensnares Farrar and Clio, a couple living on another continent, who begin to understand that their business interests are intertwined with enterprises more sinister than they’d realized.
Fearing the wrath of Peter Zugravi, a criminal with international reach, Farrar sends Clio and their daughter Sydney to a remote island where he hopes Zugravi will never find them. It’s here that Clio finally unlocks the family secrets and the mysterious origins of her family’s wealth.
With characteristically razor-sharp prose, Margaret Sweatman mines the dark caverns of global capitalism in this new addition to the resource “noir” canon. Intense, visceral, and agile, Night Birds is an all-absorbing thriller, whose morally complex characters are called upon to reckon with the power than runs beneath their feet and the consequences of their own complicity.
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Margaret Sweatman continues to astonish as she breaks ground with each new book. In Night Birds, the ground is the earth itself — the hidden realm of buried riches beneath our feet. Caught in the aftermath of a Romanian gold mine’s collapse, Sweatman’s characters descend into a darkness both geological and human, their lives bound to a distant industrialist whose remorseless pursuit of the planet’s wealth poisons both land and spirit. Visionary and urgent. — Thomas Wharton, author of Wolf, Moon, Dog
Margaret Sweatman’s stylish thriller Night Birds is a slow burn that sparks with suspense as it explores the secrets and disintegration of trust between a couple unwittingly caught in a criminal web. Set within a worsening climate crisis and haunted by an environmental catastrophe, this novel beautifully and painfully captures the soul sickness of our time. — Gail Anderson-Dargatz, author of The Almost Widow
In Night Birds, the toxic touch of global capital infects and connects lives similarly touched by a brooding backdrop of climate disaster. A mine that causes literal destruction becomes a metaphor for each character’s secret depths. Sweatman has penned a propulsive, urgently contemporary novel. Its prose sparks and crackles. — Catherine Bush, author of Skin
Night Birds contains a cast of characters out of a Graham Greene daydream. Pirates and dreamers mixed in with dancers, musicians, and engineers. These characters orbit each other, pulled by the gravity of love, lust, and greed. A thrilling and spiralling tale. — Jeremy Thomas Gilmer, author of This Rare Earth
Considering [Sweatman’s] involvement in various artistic mediums, it is no surprise that Night Birds is a story rich in substance and textures, with characters to match. — The Seaboard Review of Books
Sweatman’s book is a timely warning during these uncertain times, and a triumph by a local author. — Winnipeg Free Press
Sweatman’s lush, vivid, musical prose immerses the reader in the physical and sensual world of her characters. The prologue in which the mine disaster unfolds is a tour-de-force of harrowing detail, perfectly paced and devastating. — Atlantic Books Today
I appreciate Sweatman’s grappling with themes of environmental collapse and personal integrity, her vivid powers of description and development of complex characters. Night Birds can be read as a cautionary tale. The earth, art, and our relationships with each other are precious gifts than can be destroyed by ownership, and they should be handled with care. — Prairie Fire
Sweatman has written an environmental thriller in which lovely passages shimmer on the page while morally complex characters people the book. An engaging read. — The Miramichi Reader
Margaret Sweatman is a novelist, playwright, poet, and performer. Her work has won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, the Margaret Laurence Book Award, the Carol Shields Winnipeg Award, and the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award. Night Birds is her seventh novel. She lives in Winnipeg.
