J.M. Sidorova was raised in the USSR, Singapore, and Germany, and spent most of her adult life in the United States, where she has been working as a biomedical research scientist and writing speculative fiction. Her novel The Age of Ice, two parts history, one part magic realism, received an honorable mention in Tor.com’s best fiction of 2013 list. She lives in Seattle, Washington.

"Sometimes you sit down with a book and about half a page in, you realize you’re already falling in love. The Witch of Prague is smart, surprising, funny, and wrenching. I wanted to crawl inside it and live there for a few months. J. M. Sidorova is a discovery."
–Kelly Link, MacArthur Fellow and winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards

"My God, this is a miracle of a book. It’s a coming-of-age novel, a political thriller, and a sophisticated fantasy in which the magic is twisty and treacherous. J.M. Sidorova’s Alica is a young woman discovering her own power, and learning to survive under authoritarianism and the men who want to control her. I’ve never read anything like it, and I’ll be thinking about it for a long, long time."
–Daryl Gregory, World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson award-winning author of We Are All Completely Fine

"Utterly absorbing. From its lucid dream-like start to its feverishly cornucopian finish, The Witch of Prague will grip you tight with its inescapable story-tentacles. Everything is so plain and visceral, so involving, yet so acutely everyday—and suddenly you realize you’ve somehow been dragged away from consensus reality and plunged into a magic revolution: a river with three banks, a siege pitting tanks against DJs, a murderous tapestry. Sidorova is a prose poet of the highest order, and when her last words recede your mind will be covered in layer upon layer of the beautiful, urgent truths they leave behind."
–Nisi Shawl, award-winning author of Kinning and Everfair‍

"The Witch of Prague is an astonishing novel: heartbreaking, beautifully written, beautifully conceived. Sidorova is particularly good at rendering how an autocratic system feels to the people caught up in it; how, without the protection of laws and due process, we are like children in a house of violent adults, subject to their whims and flaws and always aware of their horrifying personalities. The supernatural in The Witch of Prague exists less as a system of rules and capabilities than as a series of unexplained phenomena. The practitioners are like scientists at the margins of knowledge, uncertain, constantly revising their theories and explanations and predictions as new data reveals itself and as their guesses prove unsatisfactory—I love that."
–Paul Park, author of A Princess of Roumania‍

"The Witch of Prague’s fantasy elements are elegantly subtle, its characters memorable and convincing, and its Cold War setting a visceral backdrop to its tale of romance under a communist regime. Sidorova vividly captures the uncertainties of adolescence in a time of constant danger and creates memorable characters whose choices are open to debate. In Alica she’s created a character readers will want to follow into the heart of communist Czechoslovakia and beyond. Sidorova excels at bringing historical settings to life and weaving them through with subtle, original magic. The Witch of Prague brings Sidorova’s considerable talents to the story of the Prague Spring and the ordinary people whose resistance to authoritarian communism altered the course of history. Highly recommended."
–Siobhan Carroll, author of Nebula-, Hugo-, and World Fantasy-nominated short fiction, and professor of English at the University of Delaware