This is the most brilliant book I've read this year. Maria Reva did exactly what I hoped Catherine Lacey had done with her metafictional novels. I am very impressed by her prowess in seemingly blending fact and fiction into a powerful account of the Russian invasion in Ukraine, a conservationist's mission in preserving endangered species of mollusks, and sexual tourism. A strong contender for many book prizes. Now, I must make sense of my disjointed notes and thoughts, but first: let this FAVOURITE novel to seep in.

<b>Rating: 5.0/5</b>

After the incredible reviews, I was so excited to read this. However, I have just finished and an enormously relieved that I am done with it.

Undoubtedly, the novel breaks apart the novel as a constrruct; meta-fiction, at its most inventive,

Part novel, part dialogue, part application form, part commentary - It felt disjointed, as it was intended to, no doubt. I appreciated what the author has done but I did not enjoy it one bit!

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC.

"I need to keep fact and fiction straight, but they keep blurring together."

Endling by Maria Reva is a brilliant meta-fictional debut novel, darkly humorous but with important messages about love, survival in the face of aggression, and the need for resistance against US and Russian territorial aggression, and surely must feature in this year's Booker Prize.

The novel became as a more conventional one, although with an unusual subject matter, combining the marriage-tourism industry in Ukraine with the preservation of snail species on the verge of extinction, but which was derailed by the 2022 full-scale Russian invasion, leading the author to at first abandon the project, but then pick it up with the meta-fictional slant, where the novel contains the process of writing it:

"Explain the inspiration for your project or why you wish to undertake it at this time:

My opus draws inspiration from the wellspring of narrative prowess exuded by Deb Olin Unferth's canonical work, Barn 8, wherein the notions of abduction and social justice deftly intertwine, as well as the groundbreaking metafictional elements prominently displayed within the protonovelistic oeuvre of Salvador Plascencia's The People of Paper. Thus fortified by the literary beacons that have illuminated the path before me, Endling seeks to transcend the boundaries of conventionality while being grounded in the timeless questions of the human condition. Now that Russia is conducting a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the central conflict woven into the delicate fabric of my novel, namely the influx of Western suitors into Ukraine, has been subjugated-or ripped apart, to keep with the metaphor—by a far more violent and destructive narrative. My novel (postnovel? yet-to-be defined entity?) needs further tailoring to reflect these rapidly changing circumstances."

The author has said in an interview in The Rumpus that "I think the novel is itching to be ripped apart again", and the book e.g. contains a fake ending part way through, inspired by Salvador Plascencia's book The People of Paper and this interview with him where he expresses similar sentiments. The highlight of the fake ending for me was this take on the usually rather po-faced notes on the typeface that many books include:

"A NOTE ON THE TYPE
This book, a novel, was set in Serifus Libris, a typeface designed by distinguished Italian engraver Giuseppe Pizzinini (1852-1913).

Conceived as a private handkerchief embroidery type to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of his marriage to Countess Johanna Trauttmansdorff of Austria, and modernized before his untimely death by screw press, this type displays the tireless qualities of a master craftsman intent on weaving letter to letter, sentence to sentence, chapter to chapter, to create a sense of cohesion or an illusion thereof. In this way he shaped manifold manuscripts, however unshapely in their nascent form, into acceptable books. An ardent worker, Pizzinini remained steadfast at his beloved printing press even on his (rare) breaks, arranging and rearranging letter blocks with his apprentices to see who could spell the heaviest word. He has been credited as the inventor of the game now commonly known as Scrabble."

There is a further strong resonance to the novel in 2025, which Reva mentions in the Rumpus interview: "Some people are turning Trump’s rhetoric about Canada-as-fifty-first-state into a joke. But we need to feel the power of a statement like that because it’s very close to how Putin talked about Ukraine leading up to various stages of aggression. How the border is supposedly artificial, illegitimate, that all Ukrainians want to be part of Russia, all sorts of falsehoods. Trump is saying Canadians want to be part of the US, that it would help our economy and security, that we’re basically one people because of our shared language and history."

This could, if at all, only have been a late inclusion in the novel, given Trump's Putinesque rhetoric is reasonably recent (December 2024 originally, and more seriously from around March 2025). But the it is apposite that the novel does indeed contain a passing but important reference to Laura Secord, a Canadian heroine of the fight against previous American acts of aggression.

"The Canadian hero Laura Secord came to his mind—she who’d waded thirty kilometers through forest and mud and mosquitoes two hundred years ago to warn the British colonies of an American attack, then become immortalized as a chocolate brand."

Brilliant

While Endling starts out as funny and a little bizarre, Reva takes her readers into a very personal account of what it’s like to witness a war in your homecountry from afar.

The main story of Yeva and the sisters Nastia and Sol, who start out in the Ukrainian marriage industry, each for their own reasons, is intercepted by Reva’s short chapters on writing about the war. It is a deft portrayal of life suspending literature.

Sometimes the pacing felt like it changed, which made some parts feel a little hurried. Overall Endling is a great book which I’ll happily recommend.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC.

What a stunning book. The premise of a snail scientist who gets involved with 2 sisters trying to sabotage the international bridal industry was already intriguing. I was further sucked in by the author’s interesting narrative style & how she breaks the fourth wall.

Overall, it was a moving story about Ukraine and family—both one’s own and one’s found family. I couldn’t put it down!

A brilliantly moving yet metafictional, impactful but intelligent treatment of Russian war with Ukraine.

Maria Reva was born in Ukraine (and has relatives still in Canada) although as a mainly Russian speaker, grew up in Vancouver Canada, did an MFA in Texas and published a well-received short story collection “Good Citizens Need Not Fear” (a darkly humorous series of stories set in and around an apartment block in Ukraine and based on family anecdotes) published in 2020 at which point she said in interviews she was working on a debut novel set partly in Texas and partly Ukraine.

Two years later, immediately after the Russian invasion, she tried to pitch stories on diaspora and local Ukrainian humour in the face of war to local newspapers but was told it was not the tone US/Canadian readers were looking for. She also revealed in other interviews that her grandfather (also the family archivist) was still living near the family dacha in Kherson and refusing to evacuate.

And all of this biographical detail is not just directly relevant for this book’s conception but even – part way through - plays out in its pages.
The novel begins quirkily with two storylines that quickly intersect.

In the first Yeva is a malacologist (a term she prefers to the more strictly accurate gastropodologist) - a snail expert; but also a eclipsazoologist (a studier of extinct animals) – as her specialty is finding endangered species of snails, rescuing them and attempting to revive their populations in captivity before ideally reintroducing them to ecologically protected zones. In practice the latter has happened less – and instead as she toured around Ukraine in a specially designed mobile laboratory - her experience is more of finding “endlings” – the last example of a soon to be extinct species – and time stamping their extinction. Now – as talk of Russia’s build-up of forces on Ukraine’s borders gets stronger – she is touring the country “restituting” her remaining snails while contemplating her own suicide.

Yeva’s laboratory is funded not by grants but by guest participation in “bride” parties for Western bachelors on marriage tours – and the second strand is about one such full-time bride-to-be Nastia and her interpreter (and also sister) Sol. The two are the daughters of the founder of Komod – a notorious protest troupe (think Pussy Riot) – who has now deserted them and Yeva’s participation in exactly the sort of thing her mother most opposes is largely designed to provoke their mother when she does reappear.

And when she does not – Nastia devises and then executes a plan to lure twelve of the most media friendly bachelors (a thirteenth – Pasha a returned exile – joins accidentally) into Yeva’s van promising an escape room experience followed by an exclusive party, but instead with the intention of making them hostages. This first part ends with the crack of an explosion – which we know is the start of the Russian invasion.

And that is where the novel really takes off – with the explosion not so much demolishing the walls of the tenement block illustrated in the gap between Parts – as demolishing the fourth wall entirely. As the author then directly addresses the reader telling of her difficult discussions with her agent about her draft novel “A Happy Family Is But An Earlier Heaven” – about modern day firing squads in US states (set up as a backup method of execution due to a lethal injection drug shortage). And how she had to abandon her in progress novel as firstly it contained two Ukrainian tropes “mail order brides and topless protestors” which made her queasy even in peacetime, and secondly her premise of “a so-called invasion of Western bachelors” was made invalid and unforgiveable in lights of the actual invasion.

And while the author anxiously thinks of Ukraine – the bombed buildings she sees on the screen and the unknown situation of her aforementioned grandfather – her agent compares her novel attempt to George Sanders discussions about moving from short stories to novels and how he worked out how to stitch custom built yurts together into a mansion.

And from there we have: a series of letter exchanges with newspapers about a proposed essay; a grant application form for travel to Ukraine; a happy ending to the earlier novel – in which the three girls drop off the bachelors at the nearest border before rescuing the author’s grandfather; the acknowledgements/author profile and even typeface; a surreal exchange of messages with some yurt makers.

Before returning abruptly to the novel – and the predicament of the three girls (starting with minutes of a meeting they have as they come to terms with how to deal with the outbreak of war) and chapters which then alternate between them and Pasha (in the back of the lab with the other men – completely unaware of the invasion) and a dangerous cross Ukraine trip not, initially to rescue the grandfather (although that does come via the Canada based owner of the Bride Agency who claims to know where the two sister’s mother is and will trade that first for the safe delivery of the bachelors and later for an attempt to evacuate her own – but also the same - grandfather) but instead on a quest for a potential partner to Yeva’s one remaining snail – Lefty an anti-clockwise coiled snail who she had assumed was an endling of his own genetic mutation – with another Lefty spotted by one of her fellow snail-conserver-correspondents on a photo of an acacia tree in a field in war torn Kherson.

There is an extent to which the reader at first misses the more metafictional nature of the interim section and welcomes its rare reappearances (an Interlude in which the author moves forward to her own trip to Ukraine with her own sister in 2023 but then back to 2022 and the potential partner snail in Kherson; a series of alternate chapters when the trio finally arrive in Kherson and the grandfather’s apartment) – but instead the context of the writing of the novel reinforces its excellent execution to render this section firstly moving and then later shocking as the true horrors (as well as absurdities – the two not possible to disentangle) of the war emerge and terribly impact on the van’s passengers.

Really this is quite an exceptional novel

In almost the novel’s last words the author worries if her writing a novel based on a cataclysm means she is “no better than snail, sniffing out the softest, most rotten parts of a log to feast on. At least the snail digests the rot and excretes nutrients, useful”. Well this novel may not be useful but it has huge merit not just in a literary sense but in its artistic rendering of a way to write in the apparently antithetical to art midst of a personal, national and even global cataclysm.

As the book reminds us – George Sanders attempts at yurt stitching resulted in a Booker Prize – I would be not surprised if this does not lead to at least a Booker longlisting – and disappointed if it does not.

My thanks to Little, Brown Book Group for an ARC via NetGalley

I read the book courtesy of NetGalley.

A fascinating mish-mash of genres, modes, moods, that is definitely a novel and a mansion made of yurts. The beginning seems fairly traditional, a darkly comedic drama about Ukraine right before the '22 invasion, from perspectives of a few different characters - an asexual malacologist subsidizing her conservation efforts by posing as a potential bride for romance tours, the daughter of a Femen-like activist undercover at the romance tour, planning an explosive stunt to alert the world to the dangers of bride industry, a Ukrainian Canadian guy hoping to discover authenticity in the homeland of his childhood. Each time the narrative jumped to the new character, Reva offered a fascinating glimpe into the world. Then the plot got a little less interesting, but only for a short while, because that's when the novel shifts gears completely. The author speaks directly from the pages, narrative becomes autofictional, structure gets upended by the war, because who wants to read a dark comedy when the war is escalating?

The remaining two thirds of the book don't always have the same amount of energy and power, but there are some moments that were completely touching, and others that were profoundly funny. The evisceration of Western media. The conclusions of the romantic storylines. The snails.

I liked this novel a lot. I think it should get talked about.

Yeva is a scientist. Desperate to save endangered and overlooked snail species she travels Ukraine in a mobile lab, kitted out with money she makes offering herself up as a potential bride to desperate Westerners. One day her path crosses with sisters Nastia and Solomiya, also working the circuit, but with an entirely different agenda. Then into it all comes the war.

This is a deeply strange, twistedly funny book that is both bleak and hopeful.

Description:
Yeva is a biologist with a mobile lab, trying to rescue and breed endangered snails. Nastia and Sol are the two daughters of a famous protestor, trying desperately to get her attention after she’s disappeared. Together, they kidnap 13 bachelors, foreigners who’ve come to Ukraine as part of the marriage industry, to try and find a Ukrainian bride to take home with them. They’re on the road when Russia invades…

Liked:
Intriguing premise, setting and characters. Found myself genuinely caught up in the plight of both the sisters and the snails. It’s a pacey little book and I flew through it - entertaining till the end. I really appreciated the window into the experience of a Ukrainian abroad during the invasion; the book really feels like an attempt to get the wider world to refocus on Ukraine, and it does a good job of getting your attention without feeling preachy or maudlin. I feel for the author and her fears for her grandfather.

Disliked:
That said, something about the meta section in the middle of the book doesn’t quite work for me, and I wasn’t a fan of the yurt-makers dialogue. It’s not that meta elements were included - I think they work much better toward the end of the book - but the first introduction feels overly abrupt, and the tone a little grating. I would love to have spent a bit more time with Nastia and Sol - Nastia’s head is an interesting place to be, and I was a tiny bit unsatisfied with their resolution with their mother.

Would definitely recommend, and will be interested to read more from this author.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for my free digital ARC of this one!

I was hooked by the premise of this book - international marriage agency meets a scientist trying to save endangered snails, all set against the current invasion of Ukraine and with glimmers of metadfiction. I mean, if you’re looking for something unique, Maria Reva’s got you. There’s a lot of talk about humour as a coping mechanism in this book, not making light of the situation in Ukraine of course, but a ‘laugh or we’ll cry’. I loved the way the author slipped in some little meta sections, talking about the dissonance she feels living and working away from Ukraine at a time where the country is under attack. Hearing devastating news from your home country, only to go to a dinner party and socialise with people for whom it may well not be happening at all. How does one persevere in such a messed up limbo?

It’s a hugely readable novel, the pace barely falters, and it runs the gamut of emotions from hilarity, futility, desperation, devastation. Definitely be on the lookout for this one when it comes out in July!

What a weird, wild ride! I loved the concept of this, and there's a section midway through that does such a great little metafictional trick that I'll be thinking of for a while. There were parts of this where the pacing didn't quite work for me, but overall a great read, and 100% one of my favourite cover designs in recent times.

Five star read! An incredibly sharp, witty and experimental read following three Ukrainian women with different motivations who kidnap a truckload of foreign men trying to find a docile wife through the marriage agency they are employed by.

The novel is interrupted by Russian’s invasion of Ukraine, which leads to a really interesting change in the dimensions of the novel. Endling also draws attention to the ongoing tragedy of Ukraine’s invasion, and how it became ‘old news’ for the international community in today’s rapid news cycle.

3.5 stars..
In a time when Ukraine fIn a time when Ukraine faces great challenges, Endling resonates deeply, offering a lens into the resilience of its people and the complexities of their struggles. Reva's narrative is both a tribute to the enduring human spirit and a stark reminder of the fragility of life, making it an essential read for those seeking to understand the multifaceted layers of contemporary Ukrainian society.aces great challenges, Endling resonates deeply, offering a lens into the resilience of its people and the complexities of their struggles. Reva's narrative is both a tribute to the enduring human spirit and a stark reminder of the fragility of life, making it an essential read for those seeking to understand the multifaceted layers of contemporary Ukrainian society.

Easily the most unique novel I’ve ever read. Wow. Set in contemporary Ukraine, Yeva is a biologist working on breeding and saving rare/at risk snails in her mobile lab. To fund this research, she partakes in guided romance tours with western men looking for love. Her arm is twisted by two other women who want to use her mobile lab to take some of the men hostage and shine a light on the industry… and so we follow their journey across Ukraine (with Lefty, apparently the last of his very rare species of snail) during Russia’s invasion. There were moments that were heavy and startling, but Reva’s writing was also humorous, and I finished the novel feeling hopeful. Impactful, wild, and absolutely one of a kind. 🐌 Thank you to NetGalley and Little, Brown Book Group UK for this ARC!

How do you write a novel about the Russian invasion of Ukraine without your novel becoming a bleak, despairing portrait of war? Maria Reva's debut, Endling, does so, and in doing so becomes an utterly unique, engaging, masterpiece. It is a work with many surprises, stretches of meta-fiction, sequences which are funny, sequences of despair, and moments which leave you speechless. I certainly finished this novel with the sense I had read something very special.

An Endling is the last known member of a species, but Endling never feels like the last of anything, it feels more like the beginning of something which could be quite special. I'm very keen to see what Maria Reva does next.