Odessa - by Gabrielle Sher (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

In a powerfully imagined Russia at the height of the pogroms, a grief-stricken family turn to ancient magic to bring their daughter back from the grave.

Yetta is a bright, quick teenage girl with a wild, searching spirit. Stifled by her mother's anxiety, her father's rules, and the path that's been laid out for her, she craves the kind of freedom she doesn't know the edges of. But her family has reason to be cautious and restrictive. Fear has wrapped itself around their shtetl. Jews are mysteriously disappearing, and there are whispers of an impending Gentile attack. When violence comes to their door, Yetta is killed.

Her father, in his grief, fumbles through his nascent knowledge of ancient texts and old magic to bring her back. By some miracle, Yetta is returned--but although she looks the same, Yetta is not the girl she once was. She knows there is a secret her family is keeping from her. The answer resides, in part, in the monstruous being stalking the villagers and their enemies, lurking in the woods beyond the shtetl, something that may be of her father's making, and a being which has plans of its own.

Review Quotes

"Odessa is a breathtaking debut novel. Sher's prose is quietly devastating and so beautiful that, like Yetta, I found myself split in half by the aching depths of a family's grief and their struggle to reconcile with loss."--Monika Kim, author of The Eyes Are the Best Part

"Odessa is a triumph. Gabrielle Sher has given us, at once, a classic monster tale, a heartbreakingly relevant historical drama, a pulse-poundingly contemporary descent into horror, a timeless parable about the porous boundaries between atrocity and self-defense, and above all, a powerful reclamation of agency. Count me in for whatever Sher writes next."--Nat Cassidy, author of When the Wolf Comes Home

"I did not have 'lush Jewish gothic horror novel' on my 2026 bingo card, and now I can't imagine my life without it. Odessa is resplendent and unputdownable."--Ruth Madievsky, author of All-Night Pharmacy

"Odessa is wonderfully strange, marvelously frightening, and authentically moving. Gabrielle Sher's powerful tale of terrible wrong and terrifying consequences manages both to surprise and hit all the right chilling notes."--Laird Hunt, author of the National Book Award nominated Zorrie

"A bold investigation of the costs of violence and complex aftermath of possessive grief. Gabrielle Sher stitches together myth and legend across traditions and time in startling, memorable, and moving ways." --Elizabeth Graver, author of Kantika

About the Author

Gabrielle Sher attended Hamilton College, where she earned the Rosenfeld Chapbook Prize for her novella Bowerbird. She received her MFA and PhD in Creative Writing from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Her first novel, Odessa, originated as part of her doctoral dissertation titled "Who Made Us Monsters? Narrative Psychology and The Female Jewish Gothic." She currently lives and writes in New Jersey with her husband Jamie and dog Bo.