by Ray Nayler
MCD
5/19/2026, hardcover
SKU: 9780374620752
In Ray Nayler's speculative novel of the recent past, four young teens caught between Nazis and the Red Army survive winter in the woods with the help of a flock of highly intelligent crows with a magnificent secret of their own to protect.
Neriya, a young Jewish girl who dreams of becoming a biologist, has befriended a local flock of crows in her shtetl. Czeslaw is an underage Polish soldier who deserts the Red Army and runs into the freezing Lithuanian woods. Kezia is a Roma horse trader whose family is on the run from Soviet collectivization. As the German blitzkrieg crashes across the border in June 1941, all three are caught up in the onslaught. Along with Innokentiy, an abandoned boy who cannot speak, they are driven into the primeval forest, where they survive by forming an unbreakable bond with one another--and with Neriya's intelligent crows, who for years have been bringing her intricate gifts suggesting they are no ordinary corvids.
As the war goes on, the crows warn the children of danger and help them hide from the human threats of the forest--not only the Germans but also Russian deserters, Polish partisans, fascist Lithuanian police, and the other bandits and outcasts wandering the benighted landscape.
From the Ray Bradbury Prize and Arthur C. Clarke Award finalist, and Hugo and Locus Award winner, Ray Nayler, Palaces of the Crow blends history and haunting speculative wonder into a story of survival, loyalty and the fragile beauty of life in the darkest of times.
Reviews:
"An impassioned paean to togetherness even in the midst of the chaotic isolation of war and to the power of storytelling to keep memory and hope alive." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A brilliant...blend of history and fantasy...Nayler's tale is packed with human brutality and the nobility of animals and their complex minds, never descending into sentimentality...[an] impressive novel." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A searing epic about the horrifying costs of war and the terrifying process of sanitizing the past to protect the guilty and the complicit; it wraps readers in its intensity from the first page. Highly recommended." -- Library Journal (starred review)
About the Author:
Ray Nayler is the author of the critically acclaimed novel The Mountain in the Sea, which won the Locus Award for "Best First Novel," and was a finalist for the Nebula Award and the Los Angeles Times' Ray Bradbury Prize. Called "one of the up-and-coming masters of SF short fiction" by Locus, Nayler's stories have been published in Asimov's Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Analog Science Fiction & Fact, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Vice, and Nightmare, as well as in many "Best Of" anthologies. His stories have won the Clarkesworld Readers' Poll and the Asimov's Readers' Award, and his novelette "Sarcophagus" was a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Award.