Recommendations

Books Like Winternight

A girl who can see the old spirits her village's Christianity is destroying — in medieval Russia, magic is dying

Katherine Arden's The Bear and the Nightingale opens in medieval Russia, in a village at the forest's edge where the household spirits have always been fed and the winters have always been survived. Vasilisa Petrovna is a strange child who can see these spirits when others cannot — and when a new priest arrives and teaches the village to pray to Christ instead of leaving offerings for the domovoi, the spirits begin to weaken and something darker grows in their place. If the atmospheric Slavic mythology, the morally complex cast, the sense of a beautiful and dangerous magical world vanishing, and Arden's lyrical prose gripped you, these eight picks go to the same place.