Perhaps never before in the history of humankind has the disparity between Indigenous mind and Western mind been more on the pulse of what we must pay attention to in order to insure our survival. Deena Metzger has written a novel in which two people, who are from each side of this polarity, begin a loving relationship. Sandra Birdswell is a student of climatology with an uncanny ability to sense weather events. Her mother, who died in childbirth, is a mystery to her. Her father, John, formerly a Reservation doctor, faithfully raises her despite his limitations and obligations. She first meets Terrence, a Native man and a professor of climatology, at her university classes. Years later, they are drawn together by the powerful forces of their love, for the Earth, for each other, and their mutual need to seek out the broken links of their family histories. When the UN report on climate change is released in 2007, the reality of the effects of the Anthropocene era sends a shockwave through both their lives. Their relationship to each other and to the elementals they are so intimate with lightning, thunder, rain, mountain brings them deeply and violently into a quest to live their lives in ways that disengage from colonial mind, the same mind that brought devastation to the Native peoples, and now brings all of humanity to the brink of extinction. Through their love of and deeply felt intuitive connection to the Earth, they each go to the brink of death to find their truth, to gain strength and wisdom. In clear and elegant prose, Deena Metzger yet again explores the most important issues of our time, in yet another profound and compelling way. A Rain of Night Birds is a beautiful and important novel. --Derrick Jensen, author of A Language Older Than Words Now more than ever, we need to read, and then read again, Deena Metzger s new novel, a thrilling exploration of the dilemmas we face as a species beset with extinction and as individuals beset by doubts as to how that threat to our loved ones and the Earth can be avoided in our age of confusion. The four complex protagonists take us on a journey into the depths of their despair and the lightening of their hopes, and by its end we are left trembling with grief and wisdom, challenged to leap into the arduous self-under- standing of ourselves and the indigenous past that alone can guide us through the turmoil and the fire and, perhaps, who knows, save the Earth. --Ariel Dorfman, author of the play Death and the Maiden and the forthcoming novel Darwin s Ghosts This book blew me away! I loved the characters, the writing, the unfolding of it. As a longtime environmentalist with strong Indigenous and racial justice leanings, I found it riveting, compelling and resonant. The story and characters drew me in deeply, in ways that reached my intuition, my dream time and my empathic, embodied sense of self. I immersed myself in it, reading it in several sittings as I was so engrossed. It s rare that a writer can convey so much that spans from the deeply personal to the transpersonal or universal levels, but Deena does it, masterfully. I highly recommend this book for any- one who loves Mother Earth, who resonates with Indigenous Wisdom, and who wishes to fulfill their own greatest destiny at this transformative moment for all life on Earth. --Nina Simons, Co-Founder, Bioneers; Co-Founder, Cultivating Women's Leadership Deena Metzger is a writer and healer living at the end of the road in Topanga, California. Deena is a radical thinker on behalf of the natural world and planetary survival, a teacher of writing and healing practices for 50 years and a writer and activist profoundly concerned with peacemaking, restoration and sanctuary for a beleaguered world. She has been convening ReVisioning Medicine bringing Indigenous medicine ways to heal the medical world since 2004, and is imagining a Literature of Restoration as foundations of a new viable culture. She, with writer Michael Ortiz Hill, introduced Dare to North America in 1999. Dare and the 19 Ways Training for the 5th World, are unique forms of individual, community and environmental healing based on Indigenous and contemporary medicine and wisdom traditions.