Palaces of the Crow by Ray Nayler Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Genres: historical fantasy, historical fiction, magical realism, World War II
Pages: 384
Published by MCD on May 19, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
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.
My Review:
I picked this up expecting more of Where the Axe is Buried and/or The Tusks of Extinction. What I got was a bit more of The Mountain in the Sea, crossed with, of all things, Slaughterhouse-Five and just a touch of H is for Hawk. I wasn’t expecting that at all. If you are, check your assumptions at the door because this is an awesome, heartbreaking, riveting and frequently terrifying read – but it isn’t any of the things I thought it would be.
This is one of those “fiction is the lie that tells the truth” stories, about the parts of World War II that got buried by various governments in the post-war economic boom and the Cold War. And it feels like a truth, as it quotes from a searing collection of firsthand accounts from survivors of Belarusian villages burned by the Nazis (and looted by the partisans) during World War II. That book, variously titled “I Am from the Fiery Village” or as it is referred to in Palaces of the Crow, “The Autobiography of a Burned Village” grounds this fictional story in a reality that tears at the reader over and over – but also carries the reader over the magical realism-esq parts of the story, meaning those ‘palaces’ and the crows who built them, inhabited them, and sheltered the human protagonists of this story within them during a war that did its worst to kill them and everyone around them over and over again.
And did succeed in taking one of their lives – and leaving even bigger holes in the hearts and souls of those who survived.
The story is told from the perspective of four children who became adults in the crucible of war in the middle of territory contested between Russian and Germany in what is now the Republic of Belarus. Neriya, a Jewish girl whose shtetl was burned to the ground – like over six hundred others. Kezia, a Roma girl whose family and clan were slaughtered, like so many others. Czeslaw, an underage Polish deserter from the Russian army, and an unnamed boy whose last order from his mother was to be ‘quiet’ and hasn’t spoken a word since.
Palaces of the Crow is about their survival, all too often just barely, by the skin of their teeth, in the midst of crossfire between opposing armies and/or bands of desperate, barely human survivors, in a land laid waste by war. A survival made possible by the help and protection of a flock of preternaturally intelligent crows, who warned them of danger, herded them away from hunters, and took them inside the very heart of their vast nest to allow them to survive the war’s last, desperate winter.
That description is barebones and not enough. It doesn’t convey the desperation, the danger, the moments of joy or the love between the no-longer-children in this found family of lost souls. For that, you need to read the story, and you should. Because this isn’t a hero’s story of war. It’s a survivor’s story, and that’s the perspective that needs to be told – and remembered.
Escape Rating A+: I picked this up for the author, and that’s a good thing, because it’s both not what I expected and frankly not a story that any of the blurbs are having any luck summarizing. It’s also NOT, as some of the sites have it, in any way science fictional. It’s even dubious whether it is even in the realm of speculative fiction at all.
Which doesn’t mean that it isn’t like the author’s previous work, because it very much is. Especially The Mountain in the Sea. Their themes are surprisingly similar even though their settings are centuries apart. The Mountain in the Sea is a story about an attempt to communicate with other intelligences on Earth, set during a future period of global catastrophe when survival, any and all survival, seems to be in doubt.
Palaces of the Crow is also a story about attempting to communicate with, or understand the communications of, other intelligences on Earth, set during a historic period of global catastrophe when survival seemed to be in doubt.
If The Mountain in the Sea had been set in the world of Slaughterhouse-Five – without that classic’s science fictional elements, it might have been something like Palaces of the Crow. Only bloodier and even more horrifying albeit with a somewhat more hopeful, for certain, bleak definitions of hope, ending.
But that bleakness fits the characters, the setting and the perspective of the whole story. Because this story is not told from a Western point of view. World War II, as seen from the U.S., was a distant thing, a righteous quest for glory – whether it actually was or not. The war wasn’t HERE (except for the Aleutian Islands and the lower 48 still have a difficult time seeing any parts of Alaska as ‘here’) Even for Britain, there were lots of bombs and they suffered a terrible loss of life, but they weren’t invaded. France was invaded, but it wasn’t starving frozen as it was in Belarus. It was war and it was horrifying, but it wasn’t the frozen bleakness of Belarus and the stories of it are just different (All the Light We Cannot See might serve as an example of what this story might have been if it were set in France during the same time period). The bleakness of THIS story is very much an eastern European perspective and it’s not one we see often in Western literature.
There are two twists at the end. One I saw coming, the other led to that bit of hope in the ending that I wasn’t, but was very pleased to see. Not because it was happy – although it is if you squint a bit, but because it was home.
I’m back to where I was at the beginning, that this book is marvelous and heartbreaking as long as you check your assumptions about it at the door before you start. It’s the kind of story that you’ll be thinking about for a long time after you finish – and not just because of the crows.
Where the Axe Is Buried by 
I’m every bit as wowed by Axe as I was the other two, but that’s a feeling that I came to in the end even as I muddled a bit through the middle. Which is also very much like both of those previous works. Which is where that ‘sorta/kinda’ qualifier comes in.
The Mountain in the Sea by 
In the waters off Con Dau, DIANIMA Corporation has discovered a pod of octopuses that might, just possibly, have achieved not just a similar level of intelligence to humans, but have also independently developed the skills that vaulted humans to the top of the food chain. DIANIMA has brought Dr. Ha Nguyen to Con Dau because she quite literally wrote the book on the possibility of intelligent, communicating life developing in the world’s oceans.
So what this story does, and does well, is to convey just the smallest sliver of how difficult it will be to find common ground with a species that doesn’t communicate the way we do, doesn’t have the same species imperatives, doesn’t move through its world the way we do, doesn’t use any body language we recognize. There’s not going to be the equivalent of the Rosetta Stone. It’s Dr. Ha Nguyen’s job to create one from scratch, while never being certain that her interpretation is anywhere near the correct target – let alone hitting a ‘bull’s eye’. If her base assumptions are off base, everything that follows after will be gibberish – with potentially catastrophic consequences.