Endling by Maria Reva
A novel on love, loss, humour and devastation before and during Russia's invasion of Ukraine
Ukraine, 2022. Yeva is a loner and a maverick scientist who lives out of her mobile lab. She scours the country's forests and valleys, trying and failing to breed rare snails while her relatives urge her to give up, settle down and finally start a family of her own.
What they don't know: Yeva already dates plenty of men — not for love, but to fund her work —entertaining Westerners who come to Ukraine on guided romance tours believing they'll find docile brides untainted by feminism and modernity.
Nastia and her sister, Solomiya, are also entangled in the booming marriage industry, posing as a hopeful bride and her translator while secretly searching for their missing mother — a flamboyant protestor who vanished after years of fierce activism against the romance tours.
So begins a journey of a lifetime across hundreds of miles: three angry women, a truckful of kidnapped bachelors, and Lefty, a last-of-his-kind snail with one final shot at perpetuating his species.
But their plans come to a screeching halt as Russia invades. In a stunningly ambitious and achingly raw metafictional spiral, Endling brilliantly balances horror and comedy, drawing on Reva's own experiences as a Ukrainian expat tracking her family's delicate dance of survival behind enemy lines. As fiction and reality collide on the page, Reva probes the hard truths of war: What stories must we tell ourselves to survive? To carry on with the routines of life under military occupation? And for those of us watching from overseas: can our sense of normalcy and security ever be restored, or have they always been a fragile illusion?
Endling is a tour de force from an author on the cutting edge of fiction, weaving a story of love, loss, humor, and devastation that only she can tell.
(From Knopf Canada)
Endling is available in June 2025.
Maria Reva was born in Ukraine and raised in Canada. Her work has won a National Magazine Award and has been published in The Atlantic, McSweeney's, Best American Short Stories, among others. Her novel Good Citizens Need Not Fear was on the 2020 Writers' Trust Fiction Prize shortlist. She holds an MFA from the Michener Center at the University of Texas and is also a librettist for opera. She currently lives in New Westminster, B.C.
