Night Birds by Margaret Sweatman

Reviewed by Gina Catherine Grant

I was driving home late one evening last November when I stopped at an exceptionally long red light. The light’s timing was likely on a regular interval, but the lack of any other vehicles combined with the glooming dark stretched out the moment. I looked up through my windshield and saw a burst of black silhouettes, a flurry of unidentifiable birds breaking up the dark blue sky. The next day, Night Birds by Margaret Sweatman was up for review.

I am my mother’s daughter in few ways but surely this one: Our shared habit of assigning meaning to coincidences and running towards them. I had to read Night Birds.

“Considering her [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.”

Night Birds is Margaret Sweatman’s 7th novel. Apart from being an accomplished novelist, Sweatman is also a musician, playwright, and poet. Considering her 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 plot begins with Farrar, a metallurgical engineer who built his own foundry from the bricks up, with substantial success. At the height of his career, Farrar is finally met with the reality of his past financial decisions. Paper-less, trust-based loans he’s been receiving for over fifteen years have been backed by the untouchable billionaire thug, Peter Zugravi. And now, Zugravi wants his dues. He wants Farrar to invest in his new Transylvanian gold mine, a transaction he gives Farrar little choice over. A year into the investment, a preventable disaster occurs at the mine, and Farrar realizes he’s long since signed a deal with the devil. Now he must protect his wife Clio and daughter Sydney from increasingly probable harm, while simultaneously trying to maintain the crumbling foundation of his family’s structure.

The characters of Night Birds feel fleshed out while still maintaining their mystery, that innate enigma everybody has wherein we can never fully know them, even our closest relations. Sweatman has a strong conviction and respect for each character, and allows them to be multidimensional while acknowledging dimensions that exist, yet are inaccessible–possibly even to themselves. Their lives and relationships are in flux.

In particular, the relationship between Clio and her daughter Sydney is one that morphs and seesaws throughout the novel. Sydney is fifteen and recovering from lyme disease, searching for a sense of identity already shattered by the illusion of safety. We watch in real time as Sydney finds her own way and looks for other forms of power to rely on. Clio is lost with this new version of her daughter, and pines for answers. She laments how children “don’t care that they risk their mother’s life when they risk their own.” Their relationship surpasses the tense mother-daughter trope often too easily reconciled and allows ample room for uncertainty.

Sweatman’s descriptions are as hardy as the content itself, her phrases are viscous, hard, and hot like the metals they speak of. She brings out the physical matter in each depiction and is unafraid of writing with meat, setting the scene with sentences like “Pelicans ascended spiralling thermals toward towering cumulus clouds.” She writes nature as though it’s a collage she’s gluing together, and gives agency to elements, like how the “Sunlight struck the milky lake and lifted the fog as if with a spatula.”

The ephemeral force of money and power in Night Birds is made even more menacing in contrast to the physicality of the setting and characters. Sweatman delivers in her ability to portray people as their most nakedly human selves, even if they are unable to recognize their own reflections in the mirror.

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About the Author

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.

About the Reviewer

Gina Catherine Grant is an artist, writer, and former contemporary dancer. She lives in Menahqesk/Saint John, NB, with her tuxedo cat, Richie. Her writing has appeared in The Seaboard Review of Books, It’s Burning Off, and Billie: Visual - Culture - Atlantic.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Goose Lane Editions

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ Feb. 24 2026

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 100 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1773104489

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1773104485