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 settle down.
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, who vanished after years of fierce activism against the romance tours.
Together they embark 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 when Russia invades.
As fiction and reality collide, Reva draws on her own experiences as a Ukrainian expat tracking her family’s delicate dance of survival behind enemy lines.
"Endling" probes the hard truths of war: What stories must we tell ourselves to survive? How 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?
Audio excerpted with permission of Penguin Random House Audio from ENDLING by Maria Reva, read by Max Meyers, Saskia Maarleveld and the author. Maria Reva ℗ 2025 Penguin Random House, LLC. All rights reserved.
