Winternight Trilogy

About Bear and the Nightingale

Katherine Arden's Winternight Trilogy is a historical fantasy set in medieval Russia, following Vasilisa Petrovna — a girl born able to see the old Slavic spirits that Russian Orthodox Christianity has been working to extinguish. As the church's power grows and the village neglects its protective spirits, Vasya must navigate between the human world, the Church, and the increasingly dangerous spirit world. Arden studied Russian at Middlebury College and the trilogy draws on authentic Slavic mythology and medieval Russian history. The prose is lyrical and atmospheric, the magic is treated as real and dangerous, and the world is more complex than any binary of Christianity vs. paganism suggests.