Endling

A Novel

By: Maria Reva

Length: Not Yet Known

Publisher's summary

In the absurdist literary tradition of George Saunders and Percival Everett comes a brilliant debut about a biologist in Ukraine battling to save the country’s snail species from the brink of extinction.

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, 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.

©2025 Maria Reva (P)2025 Knopf Canada

Critic reviews

“Maria Reva’s dazzling debut novel Endling will take you on a ride you will never forget. Into this brilliant stew of a novel the fearless Reva stirs Ukraine’s notorious 'romance tour' industry, feminist activists, a kidnapping caper, the fine science of snail conservation, the eternal mysteries of family dynamics, and Europe’s first major land war since World War II. Only a supremely talented writer could handle material like this, and Reva—who seems incapable of writing a dud sentence—shows she’s more than up to the task. Open this book, fasten your seatbelt, and brace for impact.” —Ben Fountain