Excerpt from Palaces of the Crow by Ray Nayler, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Excerpt

Palaces of the Crow

We become real only at the moment of our ruin. Our shtetl takes form at dusk, as the Cossacks ride into its outskirts.

We become solid as the shutters slam, as our shaking hands extinguish candles and the pogrom begins.

All between is shadow. The silversmith taps at his mold, a sound as spectral as the finger of a séance ghost behind a wall. Grain is bought and sold by spirits. Tinsmiths guide their shears through metal as frail as cobwebs.

From Tu B'Shevat through Yom Kippur and Hanukkah the holidays cycle, year after orbiting, insubstantial year. A dream of home and safety.

We wake to reality and the reek of fire.

—from The Autobiography of a Burned Village (found manuscript, author unknown)

1

NERIYA

June 1941

Buster stood at the open gate, his head cocked, watching Neriya with a black and glossy eye.

He was waiting for her to follow. He turned and walked several steps, then stopped and looked over his shoulder at her again.

Neriya hesitated.

Buster walked back to the gate and cawed. It was a loud caw, his whole body bent over, his throat and head spiked with ruffled feathers.

"All right, all right." Neriya went to the gate.

Buster began walking along the road that curved away from the shtetl and through the fields.

Neriya glanced back at her quiet house, the dark windows with her parents asleep behind them. The morning dew was still on everything, the wood of the fence and the gate wet with it.

Later, Neriya would remember every detail of that humble, mended gate. The way it sagged on its hinges, dragging in the dirt so that it had to be lifted a bit and set on its old latch. How many times her father had fixed that latch. How he nailed it back into place after it worked loose. How he finally wrapped it with wire in a failed attempt to hold it in place …

Neriya's mother loved to say that, for a man so good at fixing people, Neriya's father was terrible at fixing things.

But it was a back gate, her father had always replied. The family gate, leading through the rear yard and into the kitchen. It didn't need to be fancy.

Buster cawed at her again, so loudly he might wake her parents.

"Shh. Okay. I'm coming." Neriya closed the gate carefully behind her.

Buster was a large, handsome hooded crow. When he visited Neriya in her yard he strutted around, looking under the old table and the benches, accepting her gifts of walnuts and other treats. He always hopped up on the table to pace back and forth in front of her, demonstrating what a good-looking bird he was, black wings folded over his pearl-gray back, his black tail swishing from side to side like the coattails of a Vilnius gentleman with arms folded behind him, out for a stroll in his new frock coat.

Neriya had named him Buster in honor of Buster Keaton. During her summers in the shtetl, the movie theaters of Vilnius were what she missed most. But one summer, a traveling movie company had visited. They set up a rattling projector in the shtetl's meeting hall and showed old silent films projected on a sheet, the image juddering as a woman in a leather jacket and beret, a cigarette in her mouth, banged away at the old town piano, an instrument never played for comedy before—at least, not intentionally. They showed The General, Steamboat Bill, Jr., The Navigator.

Buster Keaton's serious, impenetrable dignity in the face of everything had reminded Neriya immediately of the cleverest of all the crows who visited her. Of the dignity in his swaying little gentleman's walk.

Buster never lost that dignity, even when he played games with her, or solved the little puzzles she built for him. He never got frustrated: he just cocked his head, contemplating, until he understood what to do next.

Excerpted from Palaces of the Crow by Ray Nayler. Copyright © 2026 by Ray Nayler. Excerpted by permission of MCD. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.