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Endling

A Novel

ebook
0 of 3 copies available
Wait time: About 17 weeks
0 of 3 copies available
Wait time: About 17 weeks
LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE Set in Ukraine, an eccentric scientist breeding rare snails crosses paths with sisters posing as members of the marriage industry to find their activist mother. As Russia invades, they embark on a wild journey with kidnapped bachelors and a last-of-its-kind snail. This darkly comic novel explores survival, love, and hope in times of encroaching darkness.

"Startling and ambitious"–New York Times  • “Virtuosic."– NPR, Fresh Air   • “Brilliant and heart-stopping."– Los Angeles Times

Animated by dark humor and cool fury."– The New Yorker • “Remarkable.”– The Washington Post

"This novel turns corners and tables. I love works that are smarter than I am, and this is one.”– Percival Everett, author of Pulitzer Prize winner James

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 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 over-seas: 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 devastation that only she can tell.
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    The publisher provides the following statement about the accessibility of the EPUB file supplied to OverDrive. Experiences may vary across reading systems. After borrowing the book, you may download the EPUB files to read in another reading system.

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    This ebook features mark-up that supports accessibility and enables compatibility with assistive technology. It has been designed to allow display properties to be modified by the reader. The file includes a table of contents, a defined reading order, and ARIA roles to identify key sections and improve the reading experience. A page list and page break locations help readers coordinate with the print edition. Headings allow readers to navigate the ebook quickly by level. Images are well described in conformance with WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Colors meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA contrast standards. There are no hazards.

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  • Reviews

    • Kirkus

      Starred review from April 1, 2025
      What begins as a wacky picaresque involving snail conservation, a missing mother, and an RV full of kidnapped Western bachelors shatters into a metafictional reckoning with the war in Ukraine. An endling is the last known member of a species before it becomes extinct, and Reva's debut novel is both about one such creature--a charming left-coiling snail named Lefty--and meant to embody the term itself, as a glimpse of a lost world. Or, as the author's agent asks her at one of the first autofictional asides in the narrative, "Wasn't your novel originally going to be about a marriage agency in Ukraine?" Well, it probably was. And it was also going to be about snails. The three central characters are 18-year-old Nastia and her sister, Solomiya, who work for a Ukrainian "romance tour" outfit, and Yeva, a scientist dedicated to saving and preserving snail species in her mobile lab (a beat-up RV), though she also moonlights at the bridal agency when she needs cash. The three come together when the sisters devise a plot they hope will result in the return of their missing mother, a famous activist who plotted stunts meant to derail the agency and its industry. The plot involves kidnapping a dozen men from the latest group of wife-seekers and holding them in Yeva's RV. This plan, and the novel containing it, are themselves derailed by the Russian invasion of 2022. This results in a hasty wrap-up of the narrative early in its second hundred pages, followed by back matter and what turns out to be a rather premature acknowledgments section. After a few blank pages, the novel resumes and continues on both fictional and metafictional trajectories, including grant applications in which Reva seeks support for continuing her work and a resumption of the main storyline in the midst of war. Her success at keeping that storyline alive, full of suspense and humor, while never letting go of what is really happening in the lives of Ukrainian people at home and abroad, is what earns this book comparisons to Percival Everett and George Saunders, though it is also entirely unique. A noteworthy literary achievement and also a good story, sure to be widely discussed and enjoyed.

      COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Library Journal

      May 1, 2025

      Reva debuts with an absurdist literary novel about the romance tours of Ukraine, where Western men come in search of docile brides. Yeva, a biologist, funds her research by entertaining such men, while sisters Nastia and Solomiya pose as bride and translator. Somehow, they end up together, with a snail and a truck of kidnapped bachelors. Prepub Alert.

      Copyright 2025 Library Journal

      Copyright 2025 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Booklist

      Starred review from June 1, 2025
      This is absurdist literary fiction about a sympathetic cast of characters (including a fictionalized version of the author herself) caught in the chaos of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Yeva, a beautiful, asexual snail scientist, is forced to join a matchmaking agency to pay for her conservation work. There, she encounters sisters Sol and Nastia, who plan to kidnap the agency's customers (the bachelors) as a form of radical protest in the hope that their feminist, activist mother will acknowledge them and come out of hiding. Yeva agrees to let the sisters use her mobile lab-RV to transport the bachelors from Kyiv to Kherson. Meanwhile, Yeva is carrying on with her work to locate a mate for her favorite endangered snail, which she lovingly calls Lefty. So it's not surprising that amid the bombs exploding around them, she ventures out in her mobile lab (towing the scheming women and kidnapped bachelors) to geolocate a fallen tree that might hold Lefty's precious snail mate, which leads to disaster. This darkly humorous story pulls off a ridiculous yet sobering plot with clever metafiction that inadvertently dissects the Russo-Ukrainian War. The powerful symbolism of Yeva and her snails will keep readers riveted.

      COPYRIGHT(2025) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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