Aaron Hamburger’s next novel The Shiva Bandit has been acquired by HarperCollins, intended for a 2026 release. After her husband disappears fighting in World War II and the Nazis invade her Polish shtetl, an intrepid woman and her two daughters flee across the Soviet Union to Tashkent, Uzbekistan. There, they struggle to survive the war living among local Muslim women, desperate refugees, and elite Soviet cultural figures whom Stalin has evacuated out of the range of German bombers.