This series, this series! I picked up the first book, The Bear and the Nightingale a few years back on sale but just didn’t get around to reading it. I’m not sure how it got to the top of my Kindle TBR pile, but I’m so glad it did!
If you like Naomi Novik’s Uprooted and Spinning Silver, or her Temeraire series, I think you’ll love Winternight. Katherine Arden’s trilogy weaves Russian Folklore, Medieval History, and religious tradition into an epic saga of faith, chaos and death, and coexistence between Christianity and more ancient traditions.
I am not a fan of books that set up Christianity as an irredeemable evil–and this one didn’t. There is one man of faith who is an antagonist, but there are also men of faith who are heroes (in other words, like real life), and there are beings of the ancient traditions who are antagonists and heroes, too.
The background of the story is the days leading up to Russia’s battle with the Tatars that in many ways solidified Russia’s disparate provinces into a united country.
I highly recommend it. Although the ebooks are pricey (you can’t resell ebooks to recover some of your costs–in essence you are only leasing them for as much as you pay for them) the books themselves are widely available at libraries, and through Amazon second hand.
The first book, The Bear and the Nightingale is available at Amazon US, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia (oddly, affordably priced in eBook in Australia!), Germany & Kobo, iBooks, Nook, GooglePlay