The untold story of female snipers
in WWII and the secret hunt for the
most evil Nazi of all.

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About The Night Sparrow

Coming spring 2025

Determined to seek revenge for her family, murdered in the Minsk ghetto, Elena enrolls in the Central Women’s Sniper Training School in 1942. Eight months later, she’s part of an all-girls sniper platoon on the eastern front. Soon, she’s ashamed of her low tally of kills. Then, she’s injured, re-deployed as an interpreter, and entangled in a secret hunt for the most evil fascist of all.

About Shelly

Shelly Sanders is the author of The Night Sparrow, coming spring, 2025 from HarperCollins, as well as the Canadian bestseller Daughters of the Occupation, and several other historical fiction novels. She graduated from the University of Waterloo with a degree in English Literature and Ryerson University with a graduate degree in journalism.

Her work is inspired by her Russian Jewish ancestry, and she is especially drawn to untold stories about little-known women who defy expectations.

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Also by Shelly

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Daughters of the Occupation “vividly recreates the nerve-wracking fear and carnage of wartime Riga, as well as the city’s feeling of grim paranoia during the late Soviet period.”
–Kirkus, Starred Review

Latest Blog Post

Aliya Moldagulova: An Unlikely Sniper Heroine

By the time Aliya Moldagulova was eight years old, in 1933, she was practically an orphan. Her mother and brother had died, and her father was a prisoner of the Soviet regime where he was being persecuted for being the son of a nobleman. For a year, Aliya wandered her small, impoverished village on the Kuraili River, until her uncle intervened. He took her to…

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