They’re sometimes allowed to be angry in a sort of righteous way for other people, but they are often discouraged from being like, “This is unfair to me. Young women aren’t allowed to be selfishly angry. She is the voice that came to me right away-the voice that I wrote for the short story.

Paste: There are many powerhouse women in Spinning Silver. It was not a real place it was so far removed from my environment growing up in New York. They both take place in a deliberately unrealistic world-in a fairy tale world-because that’s what the place they came from was to me. coming from this place that I found myself accessing more after my own child was born, where I was getting in touch with my own memory of what I thought my family history was when I was a child. So I had two of these examples: one of family history deeply rooted and part of the dominant culture, and one that felt very much under siege. Spinning Silver is about my father’s family, and they were Lithuanian Jews who had to escape persecution-not just from the Nazis, but from their own neighbors. She was severed from her roots, and she felt that separation very keenly. She didn’t go back to Poland for decades because of the communist regime.

Poland is her country, even though she’s lived in for more than 40 years and is now an American citizen. My mother, to this day, feels that she is Polish. They were deeply patriotic and deeply rooted in their country. Uprooted is very much about my mother’s side of the family, who were Polish Catholics. Novik: I started writing Uprooted after my daughter was born, and the experience of writing it, for me, was engaging with my family’s immigrant experience. What does that mean, and what inspired the novel? Paste: Spinning Silver is called the “spiritual sequel” to Uprooted. Check out the interview to learn about Novik’s inspiration for the novel, the importance of angry women in fiction and her future projects (including a Harry Potter-inspired book). We caught up with Novik at BookCon last month to chat about Spinning Silver, which celebrates its release today. Spinning Silver further cements her place as one of the genre greats, delivering a magical story tackling sacrifice and anti-Semitism that will enchant readers from cover to cover. Novik already proved her herself a master of weaving fairy tales with Uprooted, her 2015 Nebula Award-winning novel about a young woman chosen to be a “Dragon’s” servant.

But her talent for turning silver into gold draws the attention of a calculating fey king, catalyzing a chain of events that places both human and fey realms in danger. The lush retelling of a classic story follows Miryem, the daughter of Jewish moneylenders who takes on the family business. The Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale has never been as captivating as it is in Naomi Novik’s latest novel, Spinning Silver.

The spinning silver