Spinning Silver
Miryem is the daughter of a gentle, ineffectual Jewish moneylender in a small village in a fantasy Eastern Europe, and when her mother's health begins to fail from the cold and the poverty her father has allowed to accumulate, Miryem takes up the ledger herself and starts collecting what is owed. She is so good at it that the boast she makes about turning silver into gold reaches the frozen ears of the Staryk king, a fairy lord who rides down winter roads stealing mortal gold, and he arrives at her door with a challenge and a marriage offer. Naomi Novik's 2018 retelling of Rumpelstiltskin weaves together Miryem's story with a peasant girl drafted into a duke's kitchen and a young noblewoman married to a tsar who is not entirely human, into a slow, wintry novel about debt, obligation, and the women who settle accounts nobody else will.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about Spinning Silver
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Moneylender's daughter Miryem is so good at turning silver into gold that the icy Staryk king demands she do it for real. Her bargain pulls in a peasant girl and a duke's daughter, and the kingdom under both kings.
Yes. Spinning Silver is Naomi Novik's loose retelling of Rumpelstiltskin, set in a Polish-Lithuanian-inspired world with a Jewish moneylender's daughter as protagonist. Novik's earlier Uprooted is similarly fairy-tale-inspired.
Spinning Silver is a standalone. Naomi Novik's other related works (Uprooted, the Scholomance trilogy) are independent of each other and Spinning Silver.
Spinning Silver was written by Naomi Novik, published in 2018 by Random House Publishing Group.
Spinning Silver is 473 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Spinning Silver takes most readers 7 to 10 hours to finish.
Spinning Silver is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.