Among the Crows

★★★★★ "Gripping, character-driven historical fiction" featuring "remarkable characters," "incredible worldbuilding," and a compelling story filled with "anger and fear, love and heartbreak." "A profoundly moving story."
- Saifunnissa Hassam, Readers' Favorite

Among the Crows is an adult historical novel set during the Battle of Stalingrad, following a small group of civilians and soldiers as one of the most destructive battles in human history reduces their world to hunger, rubble, violence, and impossible choices.

When the German assault destroys the life Ivan once understood, survival begins stripping away everything he thought separated an ordinary man from the desperate and the cruel. Beside Anya, the woman he loves, and Olga, a young girl gradually becoming their daughter, Ivan struggles not simply to remain alive but to recognize the person who survives.

Their refuge is Kovcheg, "the Ark," an underground community near the Tsaritsa ravine where civilians, wounded soldiers, and survivors attempt to create order beneath a city collapsing above them. Food is counted. Weapons are guarded. Watches are maintained. The dead surrender what the living still need. Every rule exists because somebody suffered before it was written.

But survival makes its own demands.

Ivan discovers competence in violence and begins to fear the part of himself that finds power in it. Anya fights to preserve faith and moral truth without pretending that righteousness makes suffering easier. Mikhail, a Red Army soldier carrying the weight of those he could not save, must repeatedly decide whom necessity permits him to leave behind. Nikolai tries to preserve a community by enforcing laws that can become cruel even when they are necessary.

And Yuri, once among the most generous and loyal of them, begins making compromises with the enemy one step at a time. At first, the information seems harmless. Then food appears. Then German goods. Then papers. Each compromise helps someone survive, making the next one easier to defend.

As winter closes over Stalingrad and the German army itself becomes trapped, the people of Kovcheg discover that the greatest threat to their survival may not be hunger, bombardment, or even the enemy above them, but the things they have learned to justify beneath the ground.

Among the Crows is a story about people who do terrible things without necessarily becoming terrible people, and about the fragile difference between adapting to evil and allowing evil to become part of who you are. At its heart, it asks whether love, mercy, faith, and human dignity can survive when survival itself seems to demand their abandonment.