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Cover of Endling

Endling

by Maria Reva · 2025

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Ukraine, 2022. Yeva is a loner and a maverick biologist 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 start a family. 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 uninfluenced 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.…

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"Shortlist"
Booker Prize 2025 — Winner & Shortlist · thebookerprizes.com
"A tragicomedy about the Russian invasion of Ukraine was always going to be challenging, but Maria Reva makes her debut irresistible with spectacular writing and a bonkers plot. At the center is Yeva, a scientist dedicated to the preservation of hundreds of endangered snails, many the last of their species (endlings). When grants and academia fail, Yeva funds her lab pretending to be a prospective bride on Ukraine’s lucrative international romance tours and then gets entangled in a cross-country mass kidnapping caper meant to sabotage the trade that sustains her. But that’s not all. Endling is also a formally daring novel that breaks the barrier between fiction and commentary. One of my favorite lines: “I need to keep fact and fiction straight, but they keep blurring together.”"
NPR Books We Love — 2025 · apps.npr.org
Publishers Weekly's Best Books — 2025 · publishersweekly.com