Book links: Amazon, Goodreads

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Hugo and Locus Award winning author Ray Nayler was born in Quebec and raised in California. He lived and worked abroad for two decades in Russia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Balkans, and in Vietnam.

​Ray most recently served as international advisor to the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and as visiting scholar at the George Washington University's Institute for International Science and Technology Policy.

Ray lives in Washington, DC with his wife Anna, their daughter Lydia, and two rescued cats.

Publisher: MCD (May 19, 2026) Page count: 384 pages Formats: audiobook, ebook, paperback

At this point I’ll read basically anything Ray Nayler writes. His ideas are fresh, a little unusual, and different from ten other sci-fi novels sitting on the same shelf. Palaces of the Crow continues that streak, even if it’s a very different kind of book from The Mountain in the Sea or The Tusks of Extinction.

This one is less cerebral than his previous work, and focused on people and survival. The story follows four teenagers trying to survive Eastern Europe during World War II: a Jewish girl, a Roma girl, a Polish deserter from the Red Army, and a mute boy who has already seen too much for one lifetime. The world literally burns around them as the war rages across Europe. There are Nazis, Soviet forces, partisans, and starving civilians, and everyone is frightened, desperate or armed. 

And then there are the crows.

They are believably intelligent and they warn the children about danger, guide them through the forest, shelter them, and slowly become part of this strange found family. Nayler handles this brilliantly because he never turns the book into fantasy nonsense about magical bird kingdoms. The crows remain crows. They're smart, strange, and watchful creatures that adapt to the world around. 

I loved the atmosphere. It's grim, but not hopeless. You literally feel the hunger and despair and endless fear of being discovered. Everything feels cold, damp and dangerous. Villages disappear overnight. A pair of boots can matter more than ideology. People are fighting for another week of being alive more than for glory.

The four teenagers slowly become something like a family, but it's not rushed. They’re all frightened, traumatized, sometimes selfish, and still trying to protect one another anyway. 

The structure is clever too. The story jumps between timelines and perspectives, as it slowly reveals what happened to these characters after the war and what memories they carried with them. Nayler clearly spent an enormous amount of time researching this period, and it shows without ever becoming showy.

It seems Nayler is interested in connection between people, and between people and nature. In his previous books it was octopuses or elephants. Here it’s crows. But underneath all of it, he keeps returning to the same question: are people naturally cruel to one another, or are we built to survive together? The answer here is complicated.

This definitely isn’t an easy read. Some scenes are brutal, and the violence isn't sanitized. At the same time, Nayler avoids turning suffering into spectacle. He clearly cares about these people and the lives they’re trying to preserve. 

Honestly, this may be my favorite Nayler novel so far.