In the absurdist literary tradition of Gary Shteyngart and George Saunders comes the debut novel of a “one of the leading post-Soviet writers of her generation” (The Atlantic) and “a new talent to watch” (Margaret Atwood) which chronicles the travails of three Ukrainian women and one extremely endangered snail through the travails of capitalism, foreign invasion, romance, and survival.

Ukraine, 2022. Nastia and her sister, Solimaya, are entangled in the booming bridal industry, getting paid to entertain Western men who’ve come to Ukraine on “Romance Tours” to find their dream woman. Yeva is a loner and a maverick scientist who’s tried, and failed, to breed specimens from the region’s dwindling snail population in her mobile lab.

Nastia’s obsession with finding her absent mother—a flamboyant protestor who disappeared after years of public opposition to the romance tours—leads her to embark on the journey of a lifetime across hundreds of miles: three angry women, a truckful of kidnapped bachelors, and Lefty, a rare snail with one last shot at perpetuating his species.

This journey, and these dreams, come to a screeching halt as Russia invades. In a stunningly ambitious and achingly raw metafictional spiral, Endling brilliantly balances the comedic stakes set in motion by the plot while drawing on Reva’s personal experiences as a Ukrainian expat, forced to witness the hostilities from afar while tracking her family’s delicate dance of survival behind enemy lines. As fiction and real life combine on the page, Reva probes the hard truths of war: What is it like to leave behind one’s home and possessions? Conversely, what is it like to stay and continue with the mundanities of life and work under military occupation? For those of us witnessing from overseas: how does our sense of reality change? Can normalcy and security be restored, or have they always been an illusion?

Endling is a tour de force from an author on the cutting edge of fiction, telling a story of love, loss, humor, and devastation that only she could tell.

MARIA REVA was born in Ukraine and grew up in Canada. She holds an MFA from the Michener Center at the University of Texas. Her fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, McSweeney's, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere, and has won a National Magazine Award. She also works as an opera librettist.

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