Recommendations
Books Like Spinning Silver
A Jewish moneylender's daughter turns silver to gold — and the king of winter comes for her
Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver is a dark fairy tale retelling drawing on Russian and Jewish folklore. Miryem has taken over her father's failing moneylending business and discovered she's better at it than he was — she can turn silver to gold through sheer stubborn competence. The Staryk king, a being of winter who hoards silver and takes girls who fail his impossible tests, interprets this literally. The novel has multiple POV characters — Miryem, Wanda (a girl who becomes her servant), and Irina (a duke's daughter married to a demon-haunted tsar) — whose stories become entangled. If the fairy tale darkness, the Eastern European folk tradition, and the sense of women surviving impossible situations through intelligence rather than magic gripped you, these eight picks go to the same place.
- 1Buy
Uprooted
by Naomi Novik
Novik's own other standalone dark fairy tale — a girl taken to serve a cold wizard in a valley on the edge of a corrupted forest. Uprooted draws on Polish folklore in the same way Spinning Silver draws on Russian and Jewish tradition. Both are standalone and both won Hugo Awards.
- 2Buy
The Bear and the Nightingale
by Katherine Arden
A girl in medieval Russia whose connection to the old spirits the Christian church is driving out is the closest companion to Spinning Silver in recent fantasy — Arden has Novik's same gift for Eastern European folk tradition as a source of genuine fairy tale material, not pastiche.
- 3Buy
A Deadly Education
by Naomi Novik
Novik's own Scholomance trilogy — El discovers her magic at a school that kills students for survival. A Deadly Education has Spinning Silver's same sardonic female protagonist who survives an impossible situation through intelligence, in a completely different genre.
- 4Buy
Circe
by Madeline Miller
A woman at the margins of mythology who has been dismissed as peripheral tells her own story — Miller has Novik's same precision in prose and the same sense of a female protagonist whose power is larger and stranger than anyone around her acknowledged.
- 5Buy
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
by Susanna Clarke
Magic in an alternate England where the rules are complex and the practitioners are limited — Clarke has Novik's same sense of magic as a system with historical roots, and the same formal quality in the prose that distinguishes both from more commercial fantasy.
- 6Buy
Six of Crows
by Leigh Bardugo
A found family doing something impossible through preparation and intelligence — Bardugo has Novik's same interest in competence as a character virtue, and the same sense that the most interesting protagonists are the ones who find solutions that weren't there before they started looking.
- 7Buy
Strange the Dreamer
by Laini Taylor
A romance between two people from opposite sides of an ancient conflict, in a world where the mythology is doing something more than providing stakes — Taylor has Novik's same lushness and the same sense of a world that has been loved into existence by its author.
- 8Buy
The Night Circus
by Erin Morgenstern
A competition between two magicians inside a black-and-white circus — Morgenstern has Novik's same gift for a fairy tale atmosphere that feels genuinely enchanted, and the same sense that magic is most powerful when it's also beautiful.
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