Night Birds by Margaret Sweatman | The Miramichi Reader

Farrar is an ambitious metallurgical engineer with his own foundry who is happily married to Clio, a dress designer of some note and the heiress of a gold mine. Their adolescent daughter Sydney lives with them. Clio’s grandmother Ella, the owner of the gold mine, connects Farrar with a businessman who invests heavily in the expansion of the foundry, financing an ambitious move to produce large communications towers.

Farrar’s acquisitiveness has meant that he has been willing to take investment dollars from Peter Zugravi, a businessman with a shady reputation. Farrar does not question the source of Zugravi’s wealth, accepting increasingly large amounts of money for his expansion project. Suddenly, Farrar is approached by one of Zugravi’s associates who insists that Farrar accompany him to an open-pit gold mine in Transylvania with a view to becoming an investor.

Although Farrar initially resists, it becomes clear that he has no real choice in the matter. Very quickly, Farrar gets his first glimpse of Zugravi’s power over him and the inescapable obligation he owes him. As someone involved with “hawala money” (essentially money laundering), Zugravi’s response to Farrar is as matter-of-fact as it is chilling:

You know I am a hawaladar. A hawala broker. You’ve seen how it works. At least from one end of the telescope. Hawala money is based in trust. No paper, no oversight from a bank. Now, you and I must maintain this trust between us, come what may.

As Farrar attempts to rid himself of the obligation to the menacing Zugravi, he comes to understand that both his wife’s and daughter’s lives are now at risk, and he makes arrangements to send them off grid to the remote island home of a friend. Despite the rather dubious setting, meanwhile, his wife Clio and daughter Sydney are having a vacation of sorts. Clio is still grieving the death of her beloved grandmother, Ella, and reflects on this loss and the love for her daughter simultaneously:

Since death is arbitrary, so is life – a brilliant dark light, brutally careless of love. She lost Ella but immediately gave birth to a child whom she loved more than she ever knew she could love.

At the same time, Sydney has a will of her own, choosing to explore the island while putting herself in harm’s warm, and in high-risk situations. Clio becomes overwhelmed by worry,

She ached with the sweet poison of nostalgia for the days when Syd was very young and dependent on her, when Clio could behave any which way, when the mother was simply and naturally the child’s environment, a maternal tyranny she missed and regretted. She’d wasted precious time with her child. She shouldn’t have worked so much, should’ve taken more time, been more patient. She should’ve understood that the most important things are small, vulnerable, to be cherished.

Clio discovers that the staff at their island retreat not only knew her grandmother but also suggest that her death may have been murder. Clio begins to re-evaluate everything she has learned about the gold mine and about the circumstances of Ella’s passing.

After a period of great rain, a mudslide takes place at the gold mine, sending toxic chemicals into the local rivers and watershed. It becomes clear that disreputable mining practices have been the norm, and that the environmental disaster was entirely preventable. The political scapegoating then begins, and Farrar and his associate are implicated as being criminally liable.

As Clio unravels the source of her family’s wealth, she realizes that Farrar’s business interests have become entwined with criminal enterprise and his lack of transparency with her creates an irrevocable breach of trust between them.

Based loosely upon a Canadian mining event in the early 2000s, Sweatman has written an environmental thriller in which lovely passages shimmer on the page while morally complex characters people the book. An engaging read.

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.

Publisher: Goose Lane Editions (February 24, 2026)
Paperback 8.5″ x 5.5″ | 342 pages
ISBN: 9781773104485

Lucy E. M. Black

Website

Lucy E.M. Black (she/her/hers) is the author of The Marzipan Fruit Basket, Eleanor Courtown, Stella’s Carpet, The Brickworks and Class Lessons: Stories of Vulnerable Youth. A Quilting of Scars will be released October 2025. Her award-winning short stories have been published in Britain, Ireland, USA and Canada. She is a dynamic workshop presenter, experienced interviewer and freelance writer. She lives with her partner in the small lakeside town of Port Perry, Ontario, the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of Scugog Island, First Nations.