Six of Crows was published by Henry Holt and Company in 2015, and it is widely regarded as Bardugo’s masterpiece — a novel that transcends its YA marketing to stand as one of the finest heist narratives in fantasy fiction. Set in Ketterdam (a city inspired by Amsterdam at the height of the Dutch Golden Age — canals, commerce, competing merchant houses, and criminal gangs), it follows six characters planning an impossible break-in to the Ice Court of Fjerda.
Kaz Brekker is seventeen, a criminal prodigy who runs a gang called the Dregs. He is offered an impossible job with an enormous reward: break into the Ice Court (the most secure military installation in the world) and extract a scientist who has discovered a drug that can amplify Grisha powers to terrifying levels. He assembles a crew: Inej (a spy and acrobat, formerly trafficked), Jesper (a sharpshooter with a gambling problem), Nina (a Grisha Heartrender), Matthias (a Fjerdan soldier and Nina’s enemy-lover), and Wylan (a demolitions expert with family secrets).
The novel’s power lies not in its heist mechanics (though these are excellent) but in its characterization: each of the six carries trauma that shapes their abilities and their limitations, and the novel peels back their histories with devastating precision. Kaz’s refusal to touch bare skin, Inej’s past in a brothel, Nina and Matthias’s impossible love across enemy lines — each backstory is a novel in miniature, rendered with emotional complexity unusual in any genre.
Collecting Six of Crows
First edition (Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2015): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $40–$100
- Signed first edition: $80–$200
- Without jacket: $10–$25