In the absurdist literary tradition of George Saunders and Percival Everett comes a brilliant debut novel by a writer who is “bang-on brilliant" (Miriam Toews), about a biologist in Ukraine battling to save the country’s snail species from the brink of extinction.

Ukraine, 2022. Yeva is a loner and a maverick scientist who lives out of her mobile lab. She scours the country’s forests and valleys, trying and failing to breed rare snails while her relatives urge her to give up, settle down and finally 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 and modernity.
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—a flamboyant protestor who vanished after years of fierce activism against the romance tours.
So begins a journey of a lifetime across hundreds of miles: three angry women, a truckful of kidnapped bachelors, and Lefty, a last-of-his-kind snail with one final shot at perpetuating his species.
But their plans come to a screeching halt as Russia invades. In a stunningly ambitious and achingly raw metafictional spiral, Endling brilliantly balances horror and comedy, drawing on Reva’s own experiences as a Ukrainian expat tracking her family’s delicate dance of survival behind enemy lines. As fiction and reality collide on the page, Reva probes the hard truths of war: What stories must we tell ourselves to survive? To carry on with the routines of life under military occupation? And for those of us watching from overseas: can our sense of normalcy and security ever be restored, or have they always been a fragile illusion?
Endling is a tour de force from an author on the cutting edge of fiction, weaving a story of love, loss, humor, and devastation that only she can tell.
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Maria Reva's profile page

MARIA REVA was born in Ukraine and grew up in Canada. She holds an MFA from the Michener Center at the University of Texas. Her fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, McSweeney's, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere, and has won a National Magazine Award. She also works as an opera librettist.

Advance Praise for Endling

“Maria Reva’s dazzling debut novel Endling will take you on a ride you will never forget. Into this brilliant stew of a novel the fearless Reva stirs Ukraine’s notorious 'romance tour' industry, feminist activists, a kidnapping caper, the fine science of snail conservation, the eternal mysteries of family dynamics, and Europe’s first major land war since World War II. Only a supremely talented writer could handle material like this, and Reva—who seems incapable of writing a dud sentence—shows she’s more than up to the task. Open this book, fasten your seatbelt, and brace for impact.” —Ben Fountain
Praise for Good Citizens Need Not Fear

Finalist for the 2020 Writers' Trust Fiction Prize • Finalist for the 2020 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize • Winner of the 2020 • Kobzar Book Award • A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year • A Guardian Best Book of the Year

“Bright, funny, satirical and relevant. . . . A new talent to watch!” —Margaret Atwood

“Good Citizens Need Not Fear is the funniest, most politically astute book I've read in years. Reva's pitch perfect tone--especially at that comic junction where the absurdity of a system rigged to control human beings collides with actual humans—is bang-on brilliant.” —Miriam Toews

“Creative, poignant, and darkly hilarious, Good Citizens Need Not Fear is full of relevant questions about resistance, corruption, and maintaining dignity against the dehumanizing power of the State. This is an outstanding first book.” —Anthony Doerr

“Luminous. These stories speak with humour yet real emotion of the heaviness of totalitarian systems and show how the light of our humanity still shines through. Terrific stuff.” —Yann Martel

“Maria Reva is a miracle writer: how else to explain how dark and suffused with light these stories are, how genuinely hilarious and very serious, how entertaining and thought provoking? You've never read anything like them, and together they make an incredible, strange, & deeply exciting book.” —Elizabeth McCracken

“I have never read anything like these radiant stories. They are true originals—funny, devastating, and containing a weird, wild energy. These citizens, living in the literally collapsing buildings of Ukraine, will not be crushed or silenced. They have something urgent to say about where we are today.” —Deb Olin Unferth

“Witheringly incisive and consistently pitch-perfect, Good Citizens Need Not Fear is nothing short of a comic triumph.” —The Globe and Mail

“Maria Reva’s enthralling debut of interlinked short stories achieves the double effect of timelessness and timeliness. The emotional impact of this book is cumulative. This is partly down to her mastery of the form: the stories are connected by a unity of place, time and relationship. More importantly, they are brought to life by Reva’s handling of darkness and light.” —The Guardian

“One of the leading post-Soviet writers of her generation while breaking through the limitations of the term itself. . . . [Reva] proves to be an incredible builder of worlds.” —The Atlantic

“These immersive linked stories grapple with Ukrainian history through the waning years of the USSR and birth pangs of democracy. . . . Reva’s characters spark off the page as they confront a brutal bureaucratic past with the only tool they possess—hope.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

“Innovative, bitingly funny.” —Entertainment Weekly

“A magic trick of a book: a dark and scathingly funny set of interconnected stories, each one alive with originality, that nonetheless leave the reader immersed in the very wholeness of these characters and their place in the world. Erased and ground down, Reva’s good citizens rise up and shine, insisting that their existence matters in harrowing and surreal and sometimes hilarious detail, as she proves the importance of writing toward the light, even—or especially—in the darkest times.” —2020 Writers Trust Fiction Prize jury (Elisabeth de Mariaffi, Waubgeshig Rice, and Yasuko Thanh)

“[A] hilarious, absurdist debut collection…Reva delights in the strange situations caused by political dysfunction, while offering surprising notes of tenderness as ordinary people learn to get by. The riotous set pieces and intelligent gaze make this an auspicious debut.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“[A] witty first collection...Reva’s tales effortlessly converge, offering well-honed portraits of her characters’ realities, sensibilities, and urgencies.” —Booklist

“A stupendous amalgam of pathos, black comedy and preposterous, post-USSR surreality. . . . [Reva’s] remarkably convincing narratives assure plenty of thoughtful entertainment. . . . A tragicomedy of the utmost absurd.” —Shelf Awareness

“Darkly funny. . . . Deeply satisfying.” ―BookRiot