$37.99
20 in stock
20 in stock
An unforgettable debut novel about the journey of three women and one extremely endangered snail through contemporary Ukraine
Ukraine, 2022. Yeva is a maverick scientist who scours the country’s forests and valleys, trying and failing to breed rare snails while her relatives urge her to settle down and 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.
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.
So begins a journey of a lifetime across a country on the brink of war: three angry women, a truckful of kidnapped bachelors, and Lefty, a last-of-his-kind snail with one final shot at perpetuating his species.
‘Brilliant … funny and smart, full of science, longing and adventure, all the while reminding us what the world stands to lose, and what it has already lost. This is essential reading’ ANN PATCHETT
‘A fantastic novel’ PERCIVAL EVERETT
‘Heartbreaking, hilarious, profound, and vital, Endling is a brilliant, visceral journey that pulses with a powerful sense of urgency and relevance to our times’ LARA PRESCOTT
Format: Paperback
Pages: 352
Imprint: Virago UK
Publication date: 10/06/2025
Endling
By Maria Reva
Review by Renata
What begins as a relatively straightforward plot takes a startling meta-fictional turn when the war in Ukraine erupts - not only into the lives of the characters, but also that of the author. Reva, who is Ukrainian born and Canadian raised, interrogates the value of writing fiction at a time when the strange and terrifying reality surrounding us so urgently demands attention. Her solution - to combine the real and the invented - results in a blackly comic story of survival in extremis. An "endling" is the name given to the last remaining members of an endangered species. Where the novel's most obvious contender for this title is a snail called "Lefty", humanity's self-destructive impulses are also in Reva's sights. While there is grief and despair in this novel, her vital and fiercely determined characters push against this darkness by continuing, against very long odds, to reach for hope.
