Palaces of the Crow: A Guest Post by Ray Nayler

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. Read on for an exclusive essay from Nayler on writing Palaces of the Crow. 

Palaces of the Crow is, above all else, a book about mutual aid and solidarity in the bleakest of times. It tells the story of how we find compassion, companionship, and empathy in darkness. It is also a book about marks – the inscriptions left on pages, the marks we leave on one another with our words and actions, and the brutal scars, physical and psychological, of war. It is a work of speculative fiction set in the near past, in World War II Lithuania caught between the authoritarian juggernauts of Nazi and Stalinist power, and then the occupied Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic of the 1970s, forcibly made a part of the USSR. It is a book about four children who, with the help of a flock of very unusual crows, struggle to survive in a forest of danger. But like all books, this is a book about us and about our time, right here and right now. Whether we write about the past or about the present, we write from our present moment and about our present moment. We write out of care for this moment, its turmoil and upheaval. The story of World War II is not over: we live in the world that was created by that war, even so many years from its end. I wanted Palaces of the Crow to serve as a light in the trees, guiding the reader toward understanding how those who came before us, human and animal, who were there to witness that abyss of destruction, sacrificed themselves to save one another from oblivion, and how we inherited and share in their capacity for strength. Writing the book took me through the archives, museums, ghettoes, ruined shtetls and forests of Lithuania. I always feel, as a writer, a responsibility to get everything exactly right: at one point I was on my hands and knees, photographing and cataloguing every herb in a forest meadow. Beyond that physical research there was extensive reading – of partisan and holocaust memoirs, of histories of the Central and Eastern European experience of World War II. Finally, the characters began to appear, taking the shape I needed to start. I could imagine each of their faces. I could imagine the sounds of the forest, down the snow falling on pines in winter and the warning calls of the crows. Then I was ready to begin.