Bookshelf
Alumni and faculty members who would like to have their books considered for this listing should contact Stacey Himmelberger, editor of Hamilton magazine. This list, which dates back to 2018, is updated periodically with books appearing alphabetically on the date of entry.
Odessa by Gabrielle Sher ’15.
August 11, 2026
Tags Alumni Book
(Little Brown and Co., 2026).
Inspired by stories of her great-great-grandmother’s experiences with Eastern European antisemitism, the author’s chilling debut novel is described this way by one reviewer: “Lyrical and haunting with a nearly palpable ache at its core, Odessa is a quiet horror, laying bare a comparison of real-life evils with supernatural ones. Its fear lingers long after the story is complete.”
Set in 1905, in the shtetl Odessa in the Russian Empire, this gothic thriller tells the story of a teenage girl named Yetta who is desperate for freedom in the face of her mother’s constant worrying and her father’s strictness. The family is not without cause for alarm — Jews are mysteriously disappearing, and it’s clear something terrible is about to happen. And it does.
After Yetta’s death, she is by some miracle returned to life — but she is not the girl she once was. Sensing there's a secret her family is keeping from her, she discovers the answer resides, in part, in the creature lurking in the woods beyond the shtetl — something that may be of her father’s making and a being that has plans of its own.
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Stacey Himmelberger
Editor of Hamilton magazine
