The Bear and the Nightingale
Katherine Arden
Like The Snow Child, it draws on Russian folklore and a deep, dangerous winter, letting frost demons and household spirits feel as real as the hardships of a remote wilderness family.
12 books to read next
Books Like The Snow Child
If you loved The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
Readers love The Snow Child for the way it blends a hard, realistic homesteading story with the quiet shimmer of a Russian fairy tale, never quite saying which is true. The Alaskan winter is vivid and dangerous, the prose is lyrical but plain-spoken, and at its heart is a tender, aching portrait of a marriage strained by grief and childlessness. It moves at a patient, seasonal pace, finding wonder in snow, foxes and wilderness while staying grounded in loss, work and love.
Fairy tales in real places
Once upon a river
Diane Setterfield
A mysterious girl appears and changes the lives of grieving adults who long for a child, with the same ambiguity between folklore and fact that makes The Snow Child so haunting.
Golem and the Jinni
Helene Wecker
Mythical beings navigate a carefully drawn historical world, and the gentle, character-driven magic will appeal to anyone who loved how Faina's nature stays tantalisingly uncertain.
Wild northern landscapes
To the Bright Edge of the World
Eowyn Ivey
Ivey returns to Alaska with an 1885 expedition and a wife left behind, mixing hardship, Native legend and marriage in letters and diaries with the same feel for wilderness.
The Great Alone
Kristin Hannah
A family homesteading in 1970s Alaska faces brutal winters and isolation; the land itself becomes a character, as it does for Jack and Mabel in The Snow Child.
Burial Rites
Hannah Kent
Set on a bleak Icelandic farm, it shares The Snow Child's harsh weather, hard labour and quiet, intense relationships among people forced together through long dark winters.
Grief, longing and marriage
The Light Between Oceans
M.L. Stedman
An isolated couple longing for a child receive one unexpectedly, and the emotional pull between love and doubt echoes Jack and Mabel's devotion to Faina.
Gilead
Marilynne Robinson
A slow, luminous meditation on love, faith and family that shares The Snow Child's tender attention to ordinary moments and the ache of long-awaited joy.
Plainsong
Kent Haruf
Spare, warm prose about lonely rural people forming an unlikely family, perfect for readers moved by how Jack, Mabel and their neighbours look after one another.
Lyrical and quietly magical
CIRCE
Madeline Miller
A wild, solitary heroine living close to nature and beasts, told in rich lyrical prose; readers drawn to Faina's otherness will find a kindred spirit here.
The Night Circus
Erin Morgenstern
Atmospheric, dreamlike and full of wintry wonder, it offers the same sense of enchantment sitting just at the edge of the ordinary world.
Where the Crawdads Sing
Delia Owens
A girl raised alone in the wilderness, at home with wild creatures and wary of people, recalls Faina and the beauty and danger of living apart from society.
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