Club Book Episode 196 Thomas Maltman

Thomas Maltman defies genre classification, but the award-winning author’s four novels to date each offer a grounded, unflinching look at rural and small-town life in the Upper Midwest. His first, The Night Birds, vividly captures the devastating U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 as seen through the eyes and reminiscences of German immigrants who lived alongside the Wahpekute Dakota. It amassed top literary honors from sources as varied as the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) and the Western Writers of America. Maltman’s follow ups, Little Wolves (2013) and The Land (2020), return to the sweeping Minnesota prairie and cement the author’s reputation as a master of the Midwestern Gothic. His latest, Ashes to Ashes, is a worthy addition to this corpus. In it, the sleepy town of Andwhen is rocked by two impossible mysteries. At the local Ash Wednesday service, ashes applied to parishioners’ foreheads refuse to rub off. Equally baffling, local teens uncover the centuries-old remains of a Viking explorer improbably buried in a nearby meadow.The post Club Book Episode 196 Thomas Maltman first appeared on Club Book.