"We all set our sights on the Great American Novel. . . . [Thomas Maltman] comes impressively close to laying his hands on the grail."-Madison Smartt Bell, The Boston Globe

"Maltman's prose and pacing flow from an expert hand. . . . His gaze is unflinching and balanced. . . . And while there is much loss in the novel, in the end there is salvation."-Robin Vidimos, Denver Post

"Maltman's writing is most lucid when he explores the German folklore, Dakota mysticism, and pioneer spirituality that shape his characters' understanding of their own harsh world."-Entertainment Weekly

"Thomas Maltman's debut novel, The Night Birds, soars and sings like a feathered angel."-Chicago Sun-Times

"[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)

"[A] flawless sense of history marked by its most revealing-and harrowing-details."-Booklist

The intertwining story of three generations of German immigrants to the Midwest-their clashes with slaveholders, the Dakota uprising and its aftermath-is seen through the eyes of young Asa Senger, named for an uncle killed by an Indian friend. It is the unexpected appearance of Asa's aunt Hazel, institutionalized since shortly after the mass hangings of thirty-eight Dakota warriors in Mankato in 1862, that reveals to him that the past is as close as his own heartbeat.

Thomas Maltman lives in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. This is his first novel.

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. His 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. His mother wants nothing to do with her; his father welcomes her. 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 has published essays, poetry, and fiction. He teaches at Silver Lake College in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. This is his first novel.