Sparrow Nights

An exhilarating novel of erotic and psychotic extremes from one of Canada’s best fiction writers.

Everyone would agree that Darius Halloway was the most civilized of men, a professor of French literature, a connoisseur of ideas and women and wine, a perfect guest at life’s dinner party. Darius himself would have agreed, until Emma, waifish and insatiable,walks out the door, leaving her empty clothes hangers rattling in his closet.

For a little while, it’s not so bad. He thinks she must come back, and other women find his melancholy quite compelling. But then the sparrows of insomnia start picking at the inside of his skull. Life’s little aggravating moments seem to require him to seek direct retaliation. Soon all his smoothness and cleverness is directed toward wreaking the most elaborate revenge… and getting away with it. Until the ultimate retaliation arises, and there he is, in the most damning of situations, with his nerves on fire and his heart in his throat…finally not thinking of Emma.

Publishers Weekly

The "whack, whack, whack" of the flapping flag on his neighbor's property keeps middle-aged college academic Darius Halloway awake at night. So he sneaks out in darkness and cuts the flag's rope. When another neighbor's dogs disturb his concentration, Darius poisons them, and when, at a resort hotel, he's bothered by the noise of a neighbor's air conditioner, he climbs a ladder and stuffs a glue-soaked sock into the machine's works. Self-absorbed, prone to paranoia and obsession, enamored of young women and fine wine, Darius is the brilliantly constructed protagonist and coolly lucid narrator of this new, excellent novel from Canadian writer Gilmour (Lost Between Houses). Darius's extreme responses to life condense into his erotic longing for Emma Carpenter, a young, equally impulsive graduate student whom he carries on with for a few years before she dumps him. The ditching spins Darius into a wallow of self-pity, which he alleviates momentarily via a visit to a massage parlor, where he meets a black woman named Passion, whom he invites to his house. When Passion takes him up on the offer, she robs him; when he later confronts her, he's beaten by her pimp. The next day, the pimp comes calling and Darius shoots him dead, then hacks up the body and burns it in his furnace all this perfectly justifiable to this unbearably pretentious professor of French lit, who, moments after disposing of the body, savors hearing "the opening, almost inquisitive notes of the Concierto de Aranjuez." Like Jerzy Kosinski, Gilmour is able to carry readers deep into the mind of a self-rationalizing madman; it's an exhilarating journey, expertly observed and quite disturbing. (May 1) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

David Gilmour is a novelist who’s earned the praise of literary figures as diverse as William Burroughs and Northrop Frye, and publications as diverse as The New York Times and People Magazine. His latest novel, Lost Between Houses, was a national bestseller in Canada and was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award. Gilmour was film critic for CBC-TV’s The Journal and The National for eleven years, and was the host of Gilmour on the Arts, a Gemini-award-winning arts talk show, for four years. He lives in Toronto.