KUOW72%
Author Ray Nayler's new novel is perfect for Seattle readers, history buffs — and crow fans 31%
By Katie Campbell0%
6/21/2026, 3:03:09 PM
Topics: Books
Keywords: Books, Literature, Arts And Life, Seattle, History, Crows, World War Ii, Ray Nayler, The Palaces Of The Crow
BS Summary: This article contains 29 faulty reasoning types, including Attempt to Sell a Product or Service, Halo Effect, and Biased Writer Voice, with Appeal to Emotion as the most egregious example at 18.2% saturation with 177 hits. Analysis detected 1,736 faulty-reasoning hits from 974 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 40.7% and a BS Rank of 31% (14,656 of 21,198 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 69.10% of the article peer group.
Ray Nayler’s 2022 novel “The Mountain in the Sea” was a huge hit in Seattle, and still is, featured among the staff picks at local bookstores like Third Place Books.
But if I know Seattle readers, I'm betting his latest novel will surpass his prior success in this market.
Why?
Well, because it features one of our favorite critters: the crow.
"I think crows are one of those animals that we recognize ourselves in," Nayler said when he stopped by KUOW for an interview with "Meet Me Here."
"There's just something about them that, like octopuses, which was the subject of 'The Mountain in the Sea,' just sort of attracts our interest."
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Nayler's new novel, "The Palaces of the Crow," follows four young people caught between the Nazis and the desperate remnants of the Red Army at an inflection point in World War II.
Their survival is dependent on their own cleverness and that of the crows they befriend, crows who have their own secrets to keep.
It's set in Lithuania, but it's partially inspired by one Seattle girl.
"[Seattle] had a little girl who was being given gifts by crows," he said, referencing Gabi Mann, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31604026" target="_blank">whose story was told in 2015 by the BBC</a>.
"They are gift-givers.
They expect gifts from us.
They reward behaviors from humans that they like.
They punish behaviors that they don't like."
Nayler's crows in the book certainly do, protecting the children from intruders into the forest where they're all taking shelter — and building something special.
The book isn't all about the crows, though, I'm sorry to say.
Nayler was inspired by other extraordinary girls, too, like the "lovely grandma" in Toronto whose memoir he found during his research.
"She lived in a shtetl [a Yiddish term for a small town or village] that was taken over by the Nazis, and she became a partisan [civilian resistance fighter] in the forest," Nayler said.
"She ended up raiding the same shtetl and killing the Nazis that had destroyed her shtetl and just became this amazing person."
She eventually immigrated to Canada, where she owned a little dry cleaning and tailoring business.
"And you would never know that this lovely grandma, just sitting there behind the counter at your local dry cleaner, was a partisan," he said, laughing, "like this incredibly brave 16-year-old girl, raiding the Nazi commandants in her village."
<strong><em>RELATED</em>: <a href="https://www.kuow.org/stories/author-lily-brooks-dalton-ruins-lessons-at-the-end-of-civilization" target="_blank">Lessons at the end of civilization with author Lily Brooks-Dalton</a></strong>
That teenage fighter inspired Nayler's main protagonist, a Jewish girl named Neriya who's been separated from her parents and forced into the woods.
Neriya has formed a deep bond with the local crows, including one she names for American actor Buster Keaton.
While each child — Neriya, a Polish boy named Czeslaw, a Roma girl named Kezia, and an unnamed boy who will not speak — is kind to the crows in his or her own way, it's Neriya's fascination with them the sets them on their ultimate course in the book.
Together, they represent this broad, rather beautiful theme throughout the novel, which is captured in the epigraph:
“The war of each against all is not the law of nature.
Mutual aid is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle.
(Pyotr Kropotkin, "Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution")”
THE PALACES OF THE CROW, EPIGRAPH
This theme, in addition to the crows, convinced me this might be just the right book for Seattle, especially now.
The author of that line, Pyotr Kropotkin, had been studying animal behavior and noticed they weren't really in competition with each other when resources were abundant, Nayler explained.
Rather, they tended to form large cooperatives, providing aid to one another, an observation that may seem to contrast with Charles Darwin's concept of the survival of the fittest.
"But he wasn't arguing so much against Darwin's ideas," Nayler said.
"What Kropotkin was arguing against is this idea that societies are based around competition and that they are about survival of the fittest, and that's exclusively how animals evolve.
And that becomes this poison that gets taken into society and justifies all sorts of hierarchical structures. ...
We don't live in constant conflict.
We live in constant cooperation with one another, interspersed with times of conflict. ...
The invisible atmosphere of life, the totality of life, is mostly about mutual aid and cooperation."
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Whereas Nayler's previous Seattle hit, "The Mountain in the Sea," envisioned the future — and not a very nice one — "The Palaces of the Crow" envisions a cooperative foundation on which our present was constructed.
The novel depicts very real violence that was done to millions of people during World War II and what Nayler called "the shadow" the war cast that we still live in today.
But it also depicts what strangers were willing to do to save each other.
His characters may be his own creation, but their actions are rooted in reality.
"The Palaces of the Crow" isn't what I would call a light read or even a terribly hopeful one.
If nothing else, though, it's a reminder of what people and the animals we share space with mean to each other.
"We need to remember as people that animals are not us, right?"
Nayler said.
"That they aren't just little humans in different forms walking around, but that they have their own points of view."
<em>Listen to more from Ray Nayler on KUOW's "<a href="https://www.kuow.org/podcasts/meet-me-here" target="_blank">Meet Me Here</a>" by hitting play above or by subscribing to the show wherever you get your podcasts.</em>
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89%flagged-word coverageRay Nayler
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