Spinning Silver

Spinning Silver is a 2018 fantasy novel written by Naomi Novik. Novik originally published a short story called "Spinning Silver" in The Starlit Wood anthology in 2016 and later expanded it into a novel. Spinning Silver won the American Library Association's Alex Award in 2019, the 2019 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel, and the 2019 Audie Award for Fantasy. Spinning Silver was a 2019 Hugo Award for Best Novel Nominee, a 2018 finalist for the Nebula Award for Best Novel, and a 2018 Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Fantasy. The novel is loosely based on the tale of Rumpelstiltskin. Plot summary The story of Spinning Silver unfolds in the voices of several characters, but primarily in the voices of three young women who struggle against strong evil forces, in an imaginary medieval eastern European kingdom called Lithvas. Over the last seven years, Lithvas has been suffering from long, brutal winters that are slowly killing its people. Miryem Mandelstam, a young Jewish girl, takes over her father's moneylending business to save her family from debt. A village girl, Wanda, becomes the Mandelstams' servant, and she and her brothers become close with them. One night Miryem, flush with her financial success, brags to her mother that she can “turn silver into gold”. Her boast is overheard by the Staryk, a race of fae creatures who emerge from their own world every winter to raid human settlements, and Miryem receives three deliveries of magical silver. Realizing that the Staryk will kill her if she does not give them gold in exchange, she has the metal made into three pieces of jewellery to sell. However, after the sale of the second piece, Miryem demands payment for her work; to Miryem’s horror, the Staryk king tells her that after the third, her "reward" will be marriage to him. The jewellery is bought by the duke of the city of Vysnia for his daughter, Irina; he then persuades Mirnatius, the tsar of Lithvas, to marry her. On her wedding night, Irina discovers that while wearing her Staryk jewellery, she can cross into the Staryk kingdom and magically observe her husband. Mirnatius has a contract allowing his body to be inhabited by Chernobog, a demon who drinks souls and can only emerge at night due to his hatred of sunlight. Each evening, the new tsarina escapes to the fae world, where she is safe from the demon.