Spinning Silver

Spinning Silver is a fantasy novel by Naomi Novik, published in 2018 and loosely based on the tale of Rumpelstiltskin. It grew out of a short story of the same name that appeared in the anthology The Starlit Wood in 2016, and it takes place in Lithvas, an imaginary medieval kingdom in eastern Europe.

Lithvas has been suffering seven years of long and brutal winters that are slowly killing its people. Miryem Mandelstam is a young Jewish woman who takes over her father's moneylending to save her family from poverty, and a village girl called Wanda, and later Wanda's brother, become the Mandelstams' servants. When Miryem boasts to her mother that she can turn silver into gold, the Staryk overhear her.

The Staryk are fae who leave their own world every winter to raid human settlements, and they take the claim seriously enough to bring her three deliveries of magical silver, with the clear implication that she must give them gold or die. She has the metal made into jewellery and sells it, and by the time the bargain has run its course the fate of a kingdom is bound up in it.