It’s the last Friday of February so time for me to share a few of my favourite book covers. This months are books I only recently read and I adored the story and absolutely LOVE the covers. There are a few different editions for these but my favourite are the US editions because the artwork is stunning and it felt so true to the books for me.
The Winternight Trilogy by Katherine Arden was an overall 5 star read for me in January. This trilogy is set in ‘fourteenth-century Moscow, where old gods and new vie for the soul of Russia.’ What’s not to love?
I’ll just pop up the synopsis for the first book so as not to spoil anything.
The Bear and the Nightingale (The Winternight #1)
At the edge of the Russian wilderness, winter lasts most of the year and the snowdrifts grow taller than houses. But Vasilisa doesn’t mind—she spends the winter nights huddled around the embers of a fire with her beloved siblings, listening to her nurse’s fairy tales. Above all, she loves the chilling story of Frost, the blue-eyed winter demon, who appears in the frigid night to claim unwary souls. Wise Russians fear him, her nurse says, and honor the spirits of house and yard and forest that protect their homes from evil.
After Vasilisa’s mother dies, her father goes to Moscow and brings home a new wife. Fiercely devout, city-bred, Vasilisa’s new stepmother forbids her family from honoring the household spirits. The family acquiesces, but Vasilisa is frightened, sensing that more hinges upon their rituals than anyone knows.
And indeed, crops begin to fail, evil creatures of the forest creep nearer, and misfortune stalks the village. All the while, Vasilisa’s stepmother grows ever harsher in her determination to groom her rebellious stepdaughter for either marriage or confinement in a convent.
As danger circles, Vasilisa must defy even the people she loves and call on dangerous gifts she has long concealed—this, in order to protect her family from a threat that seems to have stepped from her nurse’s most frightening tales.
The Bear and the Nightingale (The Winternight Trilogy #1) by Katherine Arden
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