"This sharp speculative WWII drama from Hugo Award winner Nayler . weaves a tapestry of resilience and resistance as intricate and well-constructed as the braided twigs of a crow's nest. In his compassionate hands, the distinction between human and animal blurs as, together, both groups thrive better than either could alone. It's an impassioned paean to togetherness even in the midst of the chaotic isolation of war and to the power of storytelling to keep memory and hope alive." -Publishers Weekly (starred review ) "A brilliant . blend of history and fantasy . Nayler's tale is packed with human brutality and the nobility of animals and their complex minds, never descending into sentimentality . The story takes many unexpected twists, too .

[an] impressive novel." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review ) "A desperate, frozen version of Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See . a searing epic about the horrifying costs of war and the terrifying process of sanitizing the past to protect the guilty and the complicit; it wraps readers in its intensity from the first page. Highly recommended." - Library Journal (starred review) "Over the last four years, Ray Nayler has become one of the most consistently fascinating science fiction writers working today thanks to his cerebral tech-thrillers, including The Mountain in the Sea (about superintelligent octopi), The Tusks of Extinction (about cloned woolly mammoths), and Where the Axe Is Buried (about an AI-centered technocracy), each of which has wound up on my year-end best-of lists. Now, Nayler's new novel is about 'a flock of highly intelligent crows' (!) that help four teenagers survive in the wilderness after getting caught between the Nazis and the Russian Army at the onset of World War II." -- Esquire , Most Anticipated Books of 2026\ "It shouldn't surprise anyone that the crows come out looking better than their human counterparts in Nayler's latest work of speculative fiction. Consider its setting: the woods of what today is Lithuania but was, during World War II, a no-man's-land over which Nazi and Soviet soldiers washed back and forth like a brutalizing tide.

That's where four young teens struggle to survive scenes of our species at its absolute worst -- rapacious, unscrupulous, murderous. Make no mistake, things get bleak. But there's hope here too, in a different kind of murder: the vast flock of hyperintelligent corvids on whom the motley group comes to depend." --Colin Dwyer, NPR.