Featured Novelist

There is an explanation from the author in the book, but can you talk about your fascination with the Runestone in Alexandria?

I am fascinated by local legends and lore, those nooks and crannies of history few have ever explored before. While many scholars consider the Kensington Runestone a fraud, it’s a remarkable geological specimen, a slab of graywacke weighing several hundred pounds and carved with intricate runes. The bloody legend told by these runes sparked my imagination. I couldn’t help imagining what might have happened if Vikings came to Minnesota in the year 1362, and I knew I had to tell this story.

Where does “Brynhild” come from? Can you talk about ties the name has to mythology? Why did you choose it?

I read the Sagas of the Icelanders and The Elder Edda: A Book of Viking Lore as part of my research for the novel. The Sagas feature history as it should be written. They tell the stories of real historical figures, only there also happen to be witches, werewolves, ghosts, and barrow wights. What fun! Then I came across the Eddas, written in verse, and I knew if I told this legend of Vikings that it needed to be written as poetry, as a secret music, a story within a story at the heart of the novel. Somewhere along the way, I stumbled upon a story of a mother who goes to visit a witch, and the witch foretells that the child she carries will cause her death and the death of all those around her. I knew the mother would try to kill the child and the child would survive. Here, Brynhild was born in my imagination. A survivor, a stowaway, a girl who would cross the ocean for the sake of her brother and come of age in a faraway land.

We noticed the short Chapter Eight, the chapter from the point of view of a cow, one of the group of cattle Basil feeds, as a unique point of view. Can you tell us about your decision to include this chapter?

I just visited a book club in Mankato, and they wanted to know all about the cows in chapter eight. There’s a dreamlike unconscious process at work when you write. The chapter before this mentions a passage in Steinbeck’s A Grapes of Wrath where the entire chapter describes a turtle trying to cross a road from the turtle’s point of view. This turtle’s journey mirrors in some ways the journey of the Joad family. I wanted a similar echo in my novel. Basil, an empath who works so closely with farm animals, can’t help wondering about the cows or the guineas with their sly avian intelligence. So, the cows get their own short chapter and I hope there are spiritual echoes in the cadence of that chapter that resonate with the larger story. Plus, haven’t you also wondered what goes on in the minds of cows?

The three teen main characters have such different pain in their lives, in real life, they might not have been friends; but you brought them into their friendship beautifully. How did you find a way to make them come together so they could bond as they did?

When my wife read this novel, she described it to me as a story about healing. This is what originally draws the three teens, all wounded in their own ways, together. They’re all misfits, outsiders to their community, and this also bonds them. They’re living in a strange time, right before the pandemic, with an entire congregation struggling to understand why these mysterious ashen marks won’t wash away. They come together quite simply because they need each other. Basil needs Morgan so he can overcome his learning disabilities. Morgan needs the two boys so she can understand what drove her mother’s obsession with the runestone. Lukas, afraid of his father, needs their support. All of these forces--their woundedness, their otherness, their mutual need—make their friendship all the more vital. And along the way, maybe they discover a genuine fondness for one another.

The spiritual journey of Basil is heartbreaking and hopeful. Was it hard to write his struggle?

Basil’s character and story are quite different from my own. All his life he’s struggled with a learning disability that makes reading difficult. His story is partly the story of a literary awakening. Through audio texts and the poems that Morgan tasks him to memorize, the words and stories are coming alive inside of him. He’s also survived an accident in a grain bin that nearly kills his father. Basil bears guilt over this, a fear that his father might never be the same. He longs for his mother, away in a psychiatric hospital for the past decade. When he’s marked with ashes that won’t wash away in the first chapter, Basil feels called to do something he’s never done before. He believes the mark is a sign, and he feels he must do all he can to bring his family together again. This farm kid, this giant on the wrestling team, this caretaker of animals, shares so little in common with me. Yet it was not difficult to write his struggle, and every chapter I wrote I felt his story become more my own.

Thomas Maltman’s first novel, The Night Birds, won an Alex Award, a Spur Award, and the Friends of American Writers Literary Award. In 2009 the American Library Association chose The Night Birds as an “Outstanding Book for the College Bound.” Little Wolves, his second novel, was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award and won the All Iowa Reads selection in 2014. He teaches at Normandale Community College and lives in the Twin Cities area with his wife, a Lutheran pastor, and his three daughters. His third novel, The Land, was published by Soho Press in October, 2020. In July of 2025, Soho Press published his fourth novel, Ashes to Ashes.