BookBrowse Reviews Palaces of the Crow by Ray Nayler

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Four children shelter from war deep in a Lithuanian forest with the help of a flock of hyperintelligent crows.

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In Ray Nayler's outstanding WWII novel, Palaces of the Crow, Neriya, a young Jewish girl, spends her summers at her family's home outside Vilnius, Lithuania's capital. She passes her time befriending the crows there, feeding them, teaching them games, and studying their intelligence. One day, as Neriya wanders in the nearby woods, one of the birds refuses to let her return home, flapping violently and pecking at her, driving her farther and farther into the forest. When she's permitted to return the next day, she finds the town has been burned to the ground, its residents apparently slaughtered. Trapped in a war zone between the German and Russian armies, she hides in the forest, soon encountering others affected by the conflict: Czeslaw, an underage deserter from the Russian army; Kezia, a Roma girl who witnessed the murder of her family; and an unnamed mute boy found wandering alone. The four become a family of sorts, learning to depend on each other—and their avian friends—for protection and survival. Circumstances eventually separate the children, and none knows what has happened to the others.

Thirty years later, Czeslaw is a powerful figure in the KGB who uses his influence to track down the others. The survivors meet in a dacha built on the ruins of Neriya's village to discuss the past and those they lost. It's these sections of the book, set in the 1970s, that are the most emotional, as those who remain discuss how the war affected them in the long term. One character states, "Part of me never walked out of these woods … And that is why I needed to come back here. To retrieve the rest of me. The other half of me. The one who didn't make it out of the forest." Another says they thought that the war's end would also mean the end of evil, "But I realized, eventually, that there would be no good world." It's a grim, heartbreaking view of how war scars even those who survive it.

Nayler's writing style avoids large blocks of descriptive prose, yet he paints vivid pictures through evocative sentences sprinkled throughout (for example, "Neriya watched them, her breath near enough to the pane to fog it, and to feel winter bleeding through the thin membrane of glass"). Most of the plot revolves around day-to-day acts of survival—such as how the boy becomes adept at spearing frogs for food—and conveys each character's thoughts about their predicament:

"Czeslaw had stopped thinking of survival days ago. He had stopped being able to imagine it. Now all he was able to imagine was making a good corpse. Being whole when he died. Not some bloody rag. Not some shapeless thing dripping gore from where it hung in the splintered branches of a tree…Survival was impossible, so let him simply die…"

The resulting narrative not only shapes rich, indelible characters, but produces a powerful tale of immense emotional depth. The author also captures his readers' hearts without allowing the story to drift into cliché or sentimentality.

Nayler won a Hugo (considered the highest award for the science fiction and fantasy genres) in 2025 for his novella The Tusks of Extinction and Palaces of the Crow is also being marketed as speculative fiction. This categorization is perhaps too limiting, because the novel fits squarely in the historical fiction genre, with very little of the fantastic about it. The only element that one might consider speculative is the super-intelligent behavior of the crows, but given the documented abilities of this species, none of their actions seem especially far-fetched (see Beyond the Book).

The novel is a page-turner, not because there's a lot of action (months go by while the children simply try to stay alive) but because Nayler's prose draws readers in so completely. That said, it's not a feel-good book; happy scenes are nearly nonexistent here. It's this intensity, though, that makes Palaces of the Crow such a remarkable achievement. Its memorable characters and affecting plot make it a must-read for fans of WWII–set historical fiction.

This review first ran in the May 20, 2026 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.