PALACES OF THE CROW

The Holocaust descends on Eastern Europe and only the carrion eaters thrive.

It is June 1941, and Neriya Abramovna Kantorova is home from school in Vilnius visiting her parents’ Lithuanian shtetl. She has an unusual friend in a hooded crow she’s named Buster in honor of the comic actor Buster Keaton. Two months later, Hitler’s armies smash their way across the frontier; when they do, it is Buster and his fellow crows that guide Neriya into the safety of the deep boreal forest where Germans fear to tread lest they be picked off by “men who might see you long before you saw them.” In time, Neriya is no longer alone: She has the company of a resourceful forester and Red Army veteran named Czesław, and, still later, of a young Roma woman named Kezia and a speechless boy. The crows are their protectors, loyal animals that, Neriya reflects, “had not ceased to live their crow lives when the shtetlach and the farmhouses burned.” Nayler’s tale is packed with human brutality and the nobility of animals and their complex minds, never descending into sentimentality as it exalts “the civilization of crows that had saved their lives, fed and sheltered and preserved them while humans ripped everything apart.” The story takes many unexpected twists, too, including a surprising revelation after Czesław reunites with his surviving woodland comrades—including that tribe of crows—three decades later, having attained high rank in the KGB with the specific intent of taking revenge against his wartime enemies. “Finding you…took power,” he says. “To do it I had to get that power. I had to become a part of the system.” The system, he makes clear, is all-consuming and remorseless, exemplified by a folk saying that rings throughout Nayler’s impressive novel: We fear werewolves not because they are men who turn into wolves, but wolves who turn into men.

A brilliant if relentlessly grim blend of history and fantasy.