Endling
A Novel
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3.9 • 9 Ratings
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE ATWOOD GIBSON WRITERS’ TRUST FICTION PRIZE • WINNER OF THE AMAZON CANADA FIRST NOVEL AWARD • WINNER OF THE GORDON BURN PRIZE • WINNER OF THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE • LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE AND THE THE DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD • FINALIST FOR THE GOVERNOR GENERAL’S LITERARY AWARD FOR FICTION AND THE ETHEL WILSON FICTION PRIZE •
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2026 CLIMATE FICTION PRIZE
Named A Best Book of the Year by The Globe and Mail • The New Yorker • CBC • Indigo • Publishers Weekly • The Irish Times • The Observer • The Guardian • The Boston Globe • The Washington Post • NPR • Good Housekeeping • Library Journal
A stunning debut novel by a writer who is “bang-on brilliant” (Miriam Toews), about a biologist in Ukraine battling to save the country’s snail species from the brink of extinction on the eve of the Russian invasion. A darkly comic novel exploring survival, love, and the impact of war.
“Startling and ambitious.” —New York Times
“Virtuosic.” —NPR, Fresh Air
“Brilliant and heart-stopping.” —Los Angeles Times
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 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, who vanished after years of fierce activism against the romance tours.
Together they embark on the 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 when 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 who weaves a story of love, loss, humor, and hope that only she can tell.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This witty novel commanded our attention. Yeva, a solitary biologist, traverses the Ukrainian countryside in a retrofitted RV mobile laboratory, striving to save an endangered snail species from extinction. In a fascinating turn, she’s funding her research by joining guided romance tours, posing as a potential bride for Western men seeking women with “traditional values.” Sisters Sol and Nastia are also entangled in the exploitative marriage-tourism industry, but they’ve got their own personal agenda. And just as the plans of these captivating, unapologetically fierce women converge, the stakes change—because the Russian invasion begins. We won’t spoil what happens next or the surreal twists author Maria Reva brings to their journey. Endling is suspenseful, thought-provoking, and unexpectedly uplifting.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Reva's astonishing metafictional tale (after Good Citizens Need Not Fear), a Ukrainian Canadian writer named Maria Reva attempts to write a novel about Ukraine's mail-order bride industry on the eve of the Russian invasion. The novel's first part consists of Reva's novel in progress featuring Yeva, a snail conservationist working to save a species on the brink of extinction by traveling around the country in her RV turned lab to find specimens for breeding. To pay for her equipment, she joins guided romance tours and goes on dates with Western men looking for a pliable Ukrainian bride. Meanwhile, sisters Nastia and Sol strive to take the bridal industry down. After Nastia borrows Yeva's RV with a plan to kidnap 12 of the bachelors, Russia invades and Reva's manuscript grinds to a halt. Reva emerges as a character in the second part, reeling from the bombings and worrying about her grandfather, who still resides in occupied Kherson, as she watches the news from Vancouver. She disappoints her agent with the news that she's quit the novel ("I was writing about a so-called invasion of Western bachelors to Ukraine, and then an actual invasion happened.... To continue now seems unforgivable"). Reva then writes a grant proposal to travel in Ukraine for research on a "postnovel" about her birth country in flux. When she returns in the final section to her three revolutionary anti-brides, their adventure brilliantly dovetails with Reva's literary experiment and wartime reckoning. This inspired and urgent novel is bound to make a major splash.
