Endling by Maria Reva

Doubleday. 2025. 352 pages.

Maria Reva’s satiric novel Endling, a recently listed candidate for the Booker Prize, provides a strikingly original overview of the war in Ukraine. Her protagonist, Yeva, is a scientist who studies the extinction of a species of snail. The “endling” of the title is a snail that has dropped off its perch and died, entering the long catalog of extinctions she records for future generations. Against all odds, one of her snails survives to meet an unlikely partner on a withered acacia tree in the middle of a battlefield.

A related subplot that intertwines in Yeva’s work is a series of “romance tours,” called “Romeo Meets Yulia,” which bring hopeful bachelors from America to Ukraine to find a wife. Participants ask each other, “Will you find the One?” but successful unions are rare despite what the organizers promise. The tours provide a scaffold for descriptions of the war and its manifold absurdities and real horrors. The reader glimpses the chaos of the battlefield from the unlikely vantage point of Yeva’s mobile lab, a prison for thirteen bachelors that Nastia and Sol, two sisters, have kidnapped from the tour and persuaded Yeva to use as a protest against the way the tours exploit the bachelors and the women they meet at organized dances and outings.

On a battlefield in Kherson, a Ukrainian peace march interrupts Russians filming a propaganda video. The director wants Nastia, who has wandered into the action, to greet a soldier and give him the traditional piece of bread and salt to welcome the troops. Unfortunately, the march happens just as the scene unfolds, with predicable results. The troops fire on the unarmed civilians who scatter in terror. The film is destroyed as the bodies mount up. Ukrainians abroad in Canada view the war from phones, laptop screens, and television monitors in gas stations. The besieged civilians flee to other countries or hole up inside their ruined buildings like snails in their broken shells.

Despite the sorrows of war, Reva creates a satire that continually surprises and delights. The marriage plot keeps reappearing to enliven the narrative. Spectators from afar may see battlefields on their videos yet miss the characters’ subtle triumphs. Some of the snails find ways to survive. Reva provides a perspective on Ukraine not available from news dispatches or body counts. Her message is one of unlikely hopes and unanticipated victories.

Elizabeth Fifer
Center Valley, Pennsylvania