In a stylized dialogue, the Unfamous Author—the narrator’s alter ego—consults fictional “Yurt Makers,” asking whether individual yurts can be joined into a single large structure. The Yurt Makers reject the idea and criticize her commercial instincts, remarking that Canadians and Americans share the same impulse to make things bigger and more marketable.

The author admits her manuscript is in poor shape and explains that she abandoned a previous novel set in Ukraine once the invasion began, doubting her right to write about the war and questioning whether she even qualifies as authentically Ukrainian. The Yurt Makers dismiss these concerns, noting that many people across the former Soviet republics were forced to speak Russian without surrendering their cultural identity.

The author then mentions that her first story collection was published at the precise moment the pandemic was declared, ensuring it went largely unnoticed—making it bitterly ironic that she is now receiving media attention solely because the war has made Ukraine a prominent topic. She asks why a country must be bombed before the world takes interest. The Yurt Makers offer a blunt, cynical reply, calling the world a “whore.”

An email exchange between the narrator and Elron McKinley, an editor at The Northwest Beacon, unfolds between March 10 and 15, 2022. McKinley rejects the narrator’s submitted essay, which frames dark humor as a Ukrainian wartime coping mechanism, saying the tone is premature and asking her to resubmit with greater emphasis on the horror of the invasion and the emotional experience of a Ukrainian living abroad.

The narrator replies that the link between humor and survival is already central to the essay and argues that Ukrainian dark humor is precisely the distinctive, non-Western perspective McKinley originally requested. He closes the exchange on March 15 by suggesting they revisit the topic once things settle—effectively shelving the piece.

In a satirical grant application to the Commonwealth Arts Foundation, the author, Maria Reva, requests travel funding for a research trip to Ukraine in support of her novel-in-progress, Endling. The novel addresses the international bridal industry and Western stereotypes of Ukrainian women as either passive or scheming. Reva connects the novel’s themes to her own repeated experiences of border interrogation as a Ukrainian-born woman married to an American—scrutiny she notes that male acquaintances with Anglo-Saxon names never encounter.

She explains that the Russian invasion has undermined the novel’s original premise and that travel to cities including Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Kherson is necessary to recalibrate the narrative. A secondary stated goal is to locate her grandfather in Kherson and bring him to safety. Under anticipated challenges, she writes simply that he will probably refuse to leave and that she has no solution. The application’s COVID-19 safety sections are answered with deadpan responses, ending with a pledge to wear a mask while seeking emergency care in the event of a nuclear incident at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia power plant.

A narrator opens by announcing the novel’s fictional resolution will end happily. When bombings begin at 5 am, Yeva, Nastia, and Sol feel a shared, involuntary pull toward Kherson. Guided by an unseen voice, they drive against the tide of westward-moving refugees and deeper into occupied territory. Yeva’s mobile laboratory proves ideally suited to the mission, as its onboard bathroom allows the group to travel without stopping at checkpoints where soldiers have been known to shoot civilians.

They arrive in Kherson, knock on the apartment door of Grandfather, the author Reva’s fictionalized grandfather stuck in Ukraine. They hear him work through a series of locks before opening it. He stands holding a wooden spoon, a pot of soup on the stove. The hungry women sit down to eat before attending to their purpose.

When they ask about his albums of family photographs and meticulously kept notebooks, he tells them he has burned everything—the photos, the notebooks, hundreds of books collected when they were scarce, and vinyl records of bands banned during the Soviet Union. He burned it all to free himself from the apartment. The narrator frames this as one more erasure in a family history repeatedly stripped of its archives and heirlooms.

The women help Grandfather down the stairs and onto the mobile lab, heading west toward a reunion with his scattered family. The narrator then offers a deliberately wishful resolution: a protective barrier seals Ukraine’s sky, all missiles reverse course, and the war ends. The chapter ends with the word END.

The author thanks her agent, editors, and publishers at Knopf Canada and Doubleday. She credits journalist Ed Yong’s reporting on snail biology and zoologist Igor Balashov’s correspondence as key research sources and notes that while her fictional snail species are mostly invented, a real left-coiling snail named Jeremy inspired one. Among the more pointed acknowledgments, she thanks Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs for placing her on their sanctions list. She closes by satirically thanking Rufus Redpen for now recognizing that A Happy Family Is But an Earlier Heaven is the superior novel and regretting his earlier dismissal of it.

A satirical author biography presents Maria Reva primarily as the celebrated author of A Happy Family Is But an Earlier Heaven, described as an instant international bestseller. Critical blurbs—including a line attributed to George Saunders invoking the yurt-mansion metaphor—praise the book as cohesive, not too dark, and definitively a novel. The bio claims the novel resulted in the re-banning of firing squads in three states and concludes by noting that Reva owns a home in New Westminster, made possible by the novel’s commercial success—an outcome pointedly contrasted with her earlier financial precarity.

A satirical colophon describes the book’s fictional typeface, Serifus Libris, designed by Italian engraver Giuseppe Pizzinini (1852-1913) originally as a private embroidery project for his wedding anniversary. Pizzinini’s central design goal—connecting letter to letter and sentence to sentence to impose cohesion on unwieldy manuscripts—mirrors the narrator’s own structural preoccupations throughout the book. The entry concludes by crediting Pizzinini as the inventor of Scrabble.

During a university book tour, the Unfamous Author enjoys extensive professional recognition while the Yurt Makers interject with updates on ongoing missile strikes across Ukrainian cities and taunt her as Ms. Voice of Ukraine, suggesting that Putin has served as her most effective publicist.

When the author insists her manuscript is complete, the Yurt Makers call the material dishonest. They press her on the fact that her real grandfather remains in Kherson—with rocket debris reportedly landing in his courtyard—while she attends receptions. The author argues that his refusal to leave constitutes a dangerous ignorance and that people close to conflict often cannot accurately assess their own risk. The Yurt Makers deflect the accusation back at her, implying she wants him safe primarily so she can move on with her own life.

Pressed to describe who her grandfather actually is, the author offers concrete details: he is a retired thermal engineer, skeptical of technology, who nonetheless secretly taught himself to operate a computer solely for Sunday video calls with the family, powering it off immediately after. The Yurt Makers accuse her of lying even about these weekly calls.

The author then admits she never truly knew her grandfather and long ago decided it was too late to change that. She shares a memory of playing piano for him, framing it as the resolution of a generational pattern: her grandfather always wanted to play piano but couldn’t, so he pushed her mother into lessons; her mother wanted to dance ballet; the narrator was steered toward ballet but wanted piano and finally got the chance in Canada.

When Reva says that, upon her visit to Ukraine as a child, her playing made her grandfather cry, the Yurt Makers interrupt to correct her—it was her grandmother, not her grandfather. The author defends the change as serving a deeper truth and explains that her grandmother has since died, and she does not wish to bring her onto the page. The section ends with the Yurt Makers telling her that her assumption about Soviet buildings all looking alike is a lazy Western cliché—proof, they say, that she has been gone far too long.