Uprooted

Uprooted is a high fantasy novel by Naomi Novik, published in 2015 and based on Polish folklore. The Nebula Award for Best Novel went to it in 2015, and in 2016 it took both the Locus Award in the best fantasy novel category and the Mythopoeic Award; the Hugo Award for Best Novel shortlisted it the same year. It is a standalone novel rather than the first of a series, and it is told as a single complete story with a settled ending.

Agnieszka's home is Dvernik, a village in Polnya. Every ten years the valley's wizard, whom people call the Dragon, is owed one teenage girl as the price of his protection from the magical forest on its border, and everyone assumes he will choose Kasia, Agnieszka's beautiful and capable friend. He takes Agnieszka, who is clumsy and distractible and never intended to be chosen, and who turns out to have the magic he was looking for, which the village has never considered a possibility.

The tower is a test of patience rather than a fairy tale, and the Wood is not a story either: it takes people, turns animals against them and keeps spreading. The wizard protects the valley from it, and neither of them explains how. Agnieszka's magic works differently from the wizard's, and neither of them can say yet what the Wood is or where its heart is, and the answers turn out to sit in the kingdom's own history rather than in the forest.

Novik writes the novel from Agnieszka's point of view, in a voice with little of the formality of the court fantasy it borrows its shape from. It is a standalone book, and it draws its magic system and its folklore from Polish sources rather than from the western European tradition, with the Wood treated as a political problem as well as a magical one.