Ashley’s Fiction Book Club at Booktenders

Ending by Maria Riva

Ukraine, 2022. Yeva is a maverick scientist who scours the country’s forests, trying and failing to breed rare snails. To fund her work, she entertains Westerners who come to Ukraine on guided romance tours believing they’ll find docile wives. Nastia and Solomiya are also entangled in the booming marriage industry, posing as a hopeful bride and her translator. Together, the three women embark on the journey of a lifetime with a truckful of kidnapped bachelors and a last-of-his-kind snail—that is, until Russia invades.

A darkly comic novel, Endling draws 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, she probes the hard truths of war: What stories must we tell ourselves to survive? Once shattered, can our sense of normalcy and security ever be restored? Endling is a metafictional tour de force weaving love, loss, humor, and devastation in a story only this author can tell.