This debut novel by Trevor Herriot is the richly observed story of Nell Rowan, who has inherited her family’s prairie farmstead and returned there to live after many decades away. Nell is increasingly obsessed by a 19th-century bird collector while haunted by memories of her mother’s disappearance.
Nell’s fascination with 19th-century bird collector William Spreadborough began during her janitorial night shifts at the National Museum of Nature. Now retired and back home on the same prairie where Spreadborough collected birds, her obsession with his life and death becomes more urgent. Though she finds consolation in the company of her border collie and horses, and the wild birds passing through each season, Nell feels increasingly isolated. Her neighbours seem indifferent to the ongoing devastation contemporary agriculture wreaks on prairie ecosystems and less than supportive of Nell’s attempts to track native bird populations. And now she is unable to escape the central mystery of her life: what happened to her mother in that long-ago snowstorm?
Things begin to shift for Nell when she provides temporary shelter to Carmelita, a fifteen-year-old foster child whose fresh view of the world around her just might rescue Nell from the hopelessness she fears is her inheritance.
Trevor Herriot’s The Economy of Sparrows connects today’s settler culture and natural science to their roots in colonial empire-building. As Nell Rowan finds the people who might help her come to some peaceful resolution of her life’s challenges, readers are faced with questions of how we engage with and value the natural world, how its truths illuminate both history and our present lives, and how we justify ourselves to the wild things of the earth.
About the Author
Trevor Herriot is a naturalist, grassland conservationist, and the author of several award-winning books, including Grass, Sky, Song and the national bestseller River in a Dry Land, both of which were short-listed for the Governor General’s Award for Nonfiction. Towards a Prairie Atonement, published in October 2016, took two Saskatchewan Book Awards. Islands of Grass (2017), a book of his essays accompanying the photographs of Branimir Gjetvaj, also won two Saskatchewan Book Awards and was short-listed for a High Plains Book award. He is a recipient of the Kloppenburg Award for Literary Merit and the Saskatchewan Order of Merit. He and his wife Karen live in Regina, and spend much of their time on a piece of Aspen Parkland prairie east of the city. The Economy of Sparrows is his eighth book, but first novel.
Reviews
Praise for The Economy of Sparrows
“What happens when two opposing notions of ‘economy’ are pitted against each other on a single patch of Prairie Earth? Does Nature’s economy—how birds and animals make their living—stand a chance against the all consuming economy of humans? The Economy of Sparrows, Trevor Herriot’s exquisite, cataclysmic novel, makes us question our earnest assumptions about the role of Homo sapiens in the natural world.”
—Wayne Grady, author of Pandexicon and The Good Father
“A very timely and illuminating read.”
–David Carpenter, author of I Never Met a Rattlesnake I Didn’t Like
“As Nell and Carmelita stop to listen for the calls of grosbeak and sparrow, as they rise predawn to witness the rattle and stamp of a grouse dance, we begin to understand how much the birds and grasses and brindled coyotes have to tell us, if only we will listen.”
–Leona Theis, author of If Sylvie Had Nine Lives
