Rusalka is a fantasy novel by American science fiction and fantasy author C. J. Cherryh. It was first published in October 1989 in the United States in a hardcover edition by Ballantine Books under its Del Rey Books imprint. Rusalka is book one of Cherryh's three-book Russian Stories trilogy set in medieval Russia in forests along the Dnieper river near Kyiv in modern-day Ukraine. The novel draws on Slavic folklore and concerns the fate of a girl who has drowned and becomes a rusalka. It is also an exploration of magic and the development of a young wizard.

Carolyn Janice Cherry, better known by the pen name C. J. Cherryh, is an American writer of speculative fiction. She has written more than 80 books since the mid-1970s, including the Hugo Award–winning novels Downbelow Station (1981) and Cyteen (1988), both set in her Alliance–Union universe, and her Foreigner series. She is known for worldbuilding, depicting fictional realms with great realism supported by vast research in history, language, psychology, and archeology.