‘Yeva saw the way the high-heeled stranger peered at the piles of clothes strewn over the bench seat of the driver’s cabin, the crumpled up sleeping bag, the slimy yellowed mouth retainer on the dash. The woman’s face sank with pity over Yeva’s itinerant life’
Endling
Written by Maria Reva
- Longlisted
- The Booker Prize 2025
- Published by Virago
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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.
Maria Reva tells a riveting, unique story; the shock is that this is her first novel
The Booker Prize 2025 judges
What the judges said
‘Endling shouldn’t be funny, but it is – very. Set in Ukraine just as Putin invades, it features three young women, on two different missions, in one vehicle. Structurally wild and playful, Endling is also heart-rending and angry. It examines colonialism, old and neo, the role of women, identity, power and powerlessness, and the very nature of fiction-writing. Maria Reva also tells a riveting, unique story; the shock is that this is her first novel. It’s a book about the world now, and about three unforgettable women, Yeva, Nastia and Solomiya, travelling together in a mobile lab. The endling, by the way, is a snail.’
What the critics said
Ania Szremski, New York Times
‘Maria Reva’s startling and ambitious whirlwind of a debut novel, Endling involves soon-to-be-extinct animal species, the worst European terrestrial conflict since World War II and the spectacularly mismatched participants of the international marriage industry.’
S. Kirk Walsh, Washington Post
‘Upon an initial reading, Maria Reva’s remarkable debut novel, Endling might be categorized several different ways: a war novel about modern-day Ukraine; a metafictional tale that examines the ethics of writing about conflict and violence; a satirical send-up of the mail-order bride industry in Ukraine; a biologist’s quest to save the last remaining snail of a species. Amazingly, Endling is all these things.’
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