Palaces of the Crow

Set in Lithuania during World War II and in the Soviet Union three decades later, the novel follows four children who hide in a forest during the Nazi occupation, protected by a flock of extraordinarily intelligent crows. Three of them survive to reunite in 1971, when the full truth about their identities and sacrifices emerges. Fragments of a found Yiddish manuscript titled The Autobiography of a Burned Village, written by an unnamed Jewish veteran of the First World War who once lived among the same crows, appear between chapters throughout the novel.

In June 1941, as Germany invades the Soviet Union, Neriya, a Jewish girl spending the summer in a small Lithuanian shtetl (a predominantly Jewish village) with her doctor father Abram and her mother Aderet, follows her favorite hooded crow, Buster, into the forest at dawn. Neriya has befriended the local crows over years and reads her father's biology texts avidly. When the sounds of war reach the shtetl, Buster physically blocks her from returning, scratching and pecking her until she stays. The screams she hears confirm the danger. A flashback reveals that before the war, Neriya showed her father crafted objects the crows had made, unlike anything documented in crow behavior. He told her to keep the discovery secret and imagined her one day presenting the findings to the scientific world.

The narrative introduces Czesław, a Polish teenager serving in the Red Army whose family was deported to a Siberian logging camp, his father and grandfather later taken by the secret police. When the German invasion destroys his unit, Czesław flees into the forest, where he encounters a vast wall of crows whose warning croaks drive him back. A third perspective follows Kezia, a thirteen-year-old Roma girl who hides inside a rotting log as German soldiers murder her father Grigore and her uncle Luca. Her sister Cosmina is raped, and her body is never found. Kezia takes her uncle's revolver and begins walking east alone.

When Neriya emerges from the forest, she finds her shtetl burned and its people gone. Czesław, hiding in the ruins, pulls her to safety before Lithuanian collaborators can find her. He leads her to a zemlyanka, a hunter's dugout built into a hillside deep in the forest. Neriya gives him the false name "Agata," concealing her Jewish identity. Czesław, who has discovered a nearby ditch filled with massacred Jewish civilians, suspects the truth but lets her believe her parents might still be alive.

As months pass, Czesław and Neriya scavenge from destroyed villages, encountering Lithuanian arsonists. A Polish forester warns Czesław that the forest is filling with dangerous armed groups. Neriya eventually reveals her true name and Jewish identity and shares her secret about the crows in exchange for survival training. Meanwhile, Kezia survives alone near the burned shtetl. In November, she finds a mute boy abandoned by refugees and takes responsibility for him. She leads the boy to the zemlyanka's doorstep and flees, but Czesław later rescues the fevered Kezia and brings her back.

When Kezia recovers, Neriya teaches her to read using Jakob von Uexküll's The Environment and Inner World of Animals. Kezia feels written language organizing her thoughts and holding at bay the mental health crises she fears she inherited from her mother Tsura, who drowned herself in a bog. The four form a tight unit: Czesław hunts, Neriya and Kezia learn to shoot and track, and the Boy bonds with the crows. Through two winters, the crows warn them of danger and accompany them on hunts. Czesław, who ranges farthest, learns that nearly all the Jews of the countryside have been killed, but keeps this from Neriya.

In July 1943, a German forest offensive forces the children to flee. Hundreds of crows wake them with alarm calls and guide their escape through a massive bog to an island. In January 1944, the Boy sneaks out and discovers the crows' home beyond a frozen cliff: an immense, interconnected city of nests spiraling through ancient trees. At its base, the children find a stone shelter containing the skeleton of the Yiddish manuscript's author, the skull filled with glittering gifts placed there by the crows.

In April 1944, Soviet partisans capture Czesław while he is hunting. He lies about being alone to protect the others and is absorbed into the partisan unit. In June, the Boy falls gravely ill, and Neriya leaves to seek medicine, but the farmstead she hoped to visit has been burned. On her return, she encounters an SS patrol. Crows attack the soldiers, buying her time to flee, but when the soldiers begin shooting the birds, Neriya steps into the open and draws their fire. She is shot and killed. Her body drifts downstream, followed by a line of crows calling to her as if she were one of their own.

While Neriya is away, Soviet partisans surround the zemlyanka and find her identity documents. Kezia, realizing the soldiers will search for Neriya if no one claims the papers, declares herself to be Neriya Abramovna Kantorova. At the partisan camp, Kezia learns that Neriya's father survived for years as a partisan doctor, sending patrols to find his daughter, but has just died. The Boy is taken away with other orphaned children.

The 1971 frame reveals the consequences. The woman who arrives at a hotel in Vilnius under the name Neriya Abramovna Kantorova is Kezia, who has lived as Neriya for nearly three decades, building a career as a biologist at the Academy of Sciences in Moscow and publishing a book called The Unnamed Senses. She carries a manuscript she has written, a retrospective account of the wartime years told from all four perspectives, the same narrative the reader has been following since the novel's opening.

Kezia travels to a dacha (a Russian country house) at the forest's edge, built by Czesław, who rose to a high-ranking KGB position after the war and used his power to turn the forest into a protected reserve. Innokentiy, the Boy, now an adult who still does not speak, lives as a forester in the woods, keeping notebooks documenting the crows' social behaviors, including their marketplace for exchanging gifts and their care for elderly and wounded birds. Czesław found Innokentiy years earlier in a Siberian construction camp, where an orphanage had assigned him the surname Voronov, meaning "the crow."

When the three reunite, they journey into the forest together. Czesław reveals he found Kezia in Moscow in 1952 but never approached, believing she was happy and that his KGB identity would endanger her; she tells him she was desperately alone. At the crows' marketplace, Kezia places a coat button Buster brought her after Neriya's death. She confesses that she feels she stole Neriya's life: her name, her father's legacy, her education. Czesław tells her she did not steal Neriya's life but saved Neriya from disappearing entirely. Innokentiy writes that his first whole memory is of Kezia leading him through a field, and that she was his first whole family.

The penultimate chapter renders Neriya's death from her own perspective: She experiences the water as a return to the great Vilnius flood of 1931, when her parents rowed through the drowned city helping everyone, a story she told through the wartime winters that became the children's shared vision of what the world could be. In the final scene, Kezia watches the crows return at evening and reflects on the reciprocal bond between the species: The safety the crows gave to children during the war is now returned through Czesław's and Innokentiy's protection of the forest. When Czesław begins to say he knows she planned to leave, Kezia interrupts him. She intends to stay.