Swan's novel, "The Western Light", is a prequel to "The Wives of Bath". The story revolves around the life of young Mouse Bradford who is torn between love for her father and the charismatic asylum inmate John Pilkie, an ex-Red Wings hockey player, serving a life sentence for the murder of his wife and baby girl. Set in Madoc's Landing, a fictional Ontario town on Georgian Bay, The Western Light weaves in details of the history of the Ontario oil boomtown Petrolia, hockey mania, bootlegging taxi drivers, and debates over psychiatry and universal health care. The novel was published by Cormorant Books in Canada (September 2012) and was also picked as one of the top ten fiction and non-fiction 2012 books by the Ontario Library Association.