Endling (2025) is a satirical, metafictional novel by Ukrainian Canadian author Maria Reva. The story follows Yeva, a disillusioned scientist who travels Ukraine in a mobile lab trying to save endangered snail species. To fund her work, she participates in international romance tours, where she becomes entangled in an activist’s scheme to kidnap foreign bachelors. This plan is violently interrupted by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, forcing the characters into dangerous and comedic situations.

Reva is the author of the award-winning linked story collection Good Citizens Need Not Fear (2020), which also explored life in Ukraine with a darkly comic tone. In Endling, the primary narrative is interwoven with metafictional interludes in which the author herself reflects on the ethical and creative challenges of writing fiction about an ongoing war. The novel explores themes including The Ambiguous Ethics of Activism, The Hierarchies of Life and Survival, and The Struggle to Maintain a Sense of National Identity.

This guide refers to the 2025 Doubleday hardcover edition.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide feature depictions of gender discrimination, antigay bias, graphic violence, death, substance use, child abuse, suicidal ideation, death by suicide, animal death, sexual content, sexual violence, and cursing.

Plot Summary

The story opens in February 2022, describing Ukrainian cities, parks, and fields still whole.

Yeva, a Ukrainian malacologist (a scientist specializing in snail conservation), has spent years traveling the country in a retrofitted mobile research trailer, rescuing endangered gastropod species and rearing them in captivity. She funds this work by posing as a “bride” on international romance tours, events organized by marriage agencies that bring Western men to Ukraine to meet prospective wives. At the height of her mission, Yeva cares for 276 snails across 13 species, but over time, her populations dwindle due to contamination, equipment failures worsened by her drinking, and her inability to replicate the precise conditions the snails need. Her favorite charge is Lefty, a tree snail whose shell spirals to the left, making him unable to breed with the vast majority of his species.

She maintains a texting relationship with Kevin, a Hawaiian snail conservationist, but she cuts off contact when he confesses romantic feelings; Yeva experiences no sexual attraction and fears any relationship will demand physical intimacy she cannot reciprocate. By the present of the story, she retains only Lefty and a cabinet of her dead, preserved specimens. She is planning her death by suicide, intending for it to happen inside her trailer, which she views as her shell.

At a romance tour hotel, 18-year-old Anastasia, who goes by Nastia, repeatedly approaches Yeva asking to rent the trailer. Nastia is the daughter of Iolanta Cherno, a famous Ukrainian feminist performance artist who founded Komod, a topless activist group that staged provocative protests against the international marriage industry. Iolanta disappeared eight months earlier, promising to return by Valentine’s Day. Nastia and her older sister, Sol (Solomiya), registered for the tours run by the agency Romeo Meets Yulia—with Nastia as a bride and Sol as an interpreter—partly for income and partly as a deliberate betrayal designed to provoke Iolanta into returning.

Valentine’s Day passes without Iolanta’s return. Nastia confesses her real plan to Yeva: She wants to kidnap bachelors, lock them in the trailer, and film a hostage video to deter the entire marriage industry, continuing her mother’s legacy. Yeva demands a formal proposal, hoping the plan’s impossibility will make Nastia abandon it. Instead, Nastia delivers a thorough presentation, and Yeva agrees to lend the trailer and serve as driver. She asserts that only 12 men can be kidnapped, and none harmed. In exchange, Nastia offers Yeva her mother’s protest wedding dress, perfect for Yeva’s burial plan. Her family has always pressured her into marrying and been disappointed with her single, eccentric lifestyle. Helping Nastia gives Yeva a reason to postpone her death. Sol discovers the plan and insists on joining.

A parallel storyline introduces Pasha (Pavel Gurka), a 38-year-old Ukrainian Canadian mechanical engineer attending the tour. Uprooted from Kyiv to British Columbia at age eight, Pasha grew up caught between his parents’ immigrant anxieties and their outsized ambitions for him. Unable to afford housing in Vancouver, he quit his job and flew to Ukraine on a one-way ticket, hoping to start a new life. At the tour, he befriends Bertrand, a charismatic tech entrepreneur.

On the last night of the tour, Nastia and Sol, wearing homemade animal masks, lure 12 bachelors into the trailer under the guise of an Escape Room leading to a “pagan fertility party” (98). Bertrand refuses to enter without Pasha, so Nastia admits a 13th hostage. At approximately 5:30 am on February 24, as Yeva drives with the sisters and the locked-in men, explosions erupt on the horizon. Russia’s full-scale invasion has begun.

The novel shifts abruptly to the first person. Reva, living in an attic near Vancouver, receives a call from her literary agent criticizing her overdue manuscript as disconnected “yurts” rather than a cohesive novel. The invasion has overtaken her fictional premise: A novel about Western bachelors “invading” Ukraine has been eclipsed by an actual military invasion. Metafictional interludes follow: satirical dialogues with imaginary “Yurt Makers” about narrative structure, a rejected essay on Ukrainian wartime humor, and a grant application mixing bureaucratic absurdity with anguish about her grandfather in occupied Kherson. A fantasy chapter imagines a wish-fulfillment ending in which the characters rescue the grandfather and the war ends cleanly. The fantasy collapses, followed by fake acknowledgments and a fake author bio before the real novel resumes.

Back in the fictional narrative, the three women decide to head west toward the Carpathian Mountains. After 17 hours on the road, they attempt to release the bachelors at a roadside stop, but the men refuse to leave, demanding their phones and passports. Bertrand leads the resistance, speculating the war is a hoax. Kevin then contacts Yeva with news that a viral photo shows a snail matching Lefty’s species on an acacia tree near Kherson, meaning a potential mate exists. Yeva announces she must go south. The sisters refuse to be left behind, and after a bitter confrontation, all three head to Kherson with the bachelors still locked inside.

In Kherson, as the city falls under Russian occupation, Pasha escapes the trailer through a skylight and sees bodies on a bridge, confirming the war is real. Russian soldiers discover the women and order the trailer opened. Bertrand, still believing the war is staged, taunts a soldier and is shot and killed. Pasha improvises, claiming they are part of a Russian propaganda film crew. The lie spirals: An actual Russian director arrives with vehicles and extras to stage a “liberation” documentary. The director selects Nastia to present ceremonial bread and salt to soldiers while Yeva uses the distraction to locate both snails on the acacia. Pasha rallies Ukrainian protesters to storm the field. In the chaos, Nastia retrieves Lefty from a burning branch while Sol smashes the film crews’ memory cards. Soldiers open fire on the crowd.

Masha, the agency founder calling from Canada, offers a deal: If Nastia evacuates Masha’s elderly grandfather from Kherson, Masha will reveal Iolanta’s location. They find the grandfather’s apartment, but he refuses to leave. Chapter 44 is presented in four successive drafts, each attempting this scene, until the final version acknowledges the author may never see her grandfather again. Masha reveals the truth: Iolanta fell in love with an American man, moved to Nevada, married, and took the name Mrs. Brown. Nastia returns to the lab empty-handed.

As the lab flees Kherson, Yeva pulls over to fix a wheel. A Russian soldier fires at the tire, but the bullet strikes Yeva. Nastia takes the wheel, speeding toward a hospital. Her phone lights up with an international call, almost certainly her mother, but she does not answer. She keeps her hand on Yeva’s, choosing the person beside her over the one who left. Inside a jar on the dashboard, Lefty and his companion finally mate.

Reva reflects on her compulsion to find meaning in catastrophe and accepts that any future visit to her grandfather will not be an evacuation. She imagines him inviting her to live with him for three months so they can simply talk, sitting for tea, hour after hour, as the acacia leaves fall and regrow.

An epilogue set in October 2023 presents a radio interview with “Pavlo Gurka,” now a painter living in Kherson. He stayed after the occupation, joined civilian protests, married a local woman, and bought a house. His paintings depict the Antonivs’kyi Bridge, the span across the Dnipro River where he once saw bodies, rendered repeatedly in different lights. He describes wartime life as intensely vivid, saying he cannot return to comfortable numbness. As the interview ends, a blast sounds in the background. The interviewer does not hear it.