{ "item_title" : "Endling", "item_author" : [" Maria Reva "], "item_description" : "LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE - WINNER OF THE GORDON BURN PRIZE - WINNER OF THE ATWOOD GIBSON WRITERS' TRUST FICTION PRIZE - SHORTLISTED FOR THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE - SHORTLISTED FOR THE CLIMATE FICTION PRIZE - LONGLISTED FOR THE DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD - FINALIST FOR THE GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARDSSet in Ukraine, an eccentric scientist breeding rare snails crosses paths with sisters posing as members of the marriage industry to find their activist mother. As Russia invades, they embark on a wild journey with kidnapped bachelors and a last-of-its-kind snail. This darkly comic novel explores survival, love, and hope in times of encroaching darkness.A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: THE WASHINGTON POST, THE NEW YORKER, NPR, GOOD HOUSEKEEPING, PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY, THE GUARDIAN, LIBRARY JOURNALStartling and ambitious.--New York Times - Virtuosic.--NPR, Fresh Air - Brilliant and heart-stopping.--Los Angeles Times 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 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, 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. 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 over-seas: 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 who weaves a story of love, loss, humor, and devastation that only she can tell.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers3.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/0/38/554/531/0385545312_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "28.00", "online_price" : "28.00", "our_price" : "28.00", "club_price" : "28.00", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "28.00" } }

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The idea of laughing at a funeral has a down-home country charm to it—gallows humor, you may call it, or black comedy. But laughing at a war? That’ll take a Ukrainian. Humor is one of the more underappreciated forms of nonviolent resistance. (Not once in Timothy Snyder’s essential text on resisting dictatorships, On Tyranny, does he make a joke.) We could spend far too much time discussing the failures of satire, the successes of comedy and the differences between the two, or we could just insist that you read Ukrainian Canadian Maria Reva’s debut novel, Endling, to see how it’s done.

Maria Reva on the improbable survival of her debut novel.

The novel’s premise is as juicy as a snail’s trail: It’s 2022 in Ukraine, and a woman named Yeva is beginning to give up on her life’s work of rescuing endangered snails. She has whittled her world down to a mobile lab, where her entire existence is occupied with keeping her snail charges moist and trying to get them to hook up. To pay her expenses, she works in the “marriage industry,” posing as a prospect for Americans and other foreign men who come in search of a Ukrainian bride. But now she’s down to her final snail, the last of his species, whose shell abnormality means he will likely never procreate. Yeva’s plans are radically disrupted when two sisters, Nastia and Solomiya, also working for the romance tour company, convince her to kidnap a bunch of the bachelors in her van, a big stunt that the sisters hope will garner the attention of their mother, a Pussy Riot-style activist who abandoned them years ago. And then Russia invades. At this point in the novel, the narrative swerves into metafiction, with our author weighing in on the type of story she’s telling (“Even in peacetime I felt queasy leaning into not one but two Ukrainian tropes, ‘mail-order brides’ and topless protesters.”) and also on how it feels to live through an attack on your people and home. At one point, she fields letters from an editor who asks her to write more emotionally about the situation in Ukraine (“gentle emphasis on horror,” he requests), and though she tries her best to explain her use of humor, he cancels the article entirely. Endling is a sinuous reminder that comic fiction is the hardest to do well, and incontrovertible evidence that Reva can do it. Thanks to its snails and its van full of bachelors, you can expect some reviews to call this book “quirky,” but really, it’s deadly serious, and so is its tremendous comedy: an act of resistance to oppression with the theatrics to turn things upside-down. The best comedy is an invitation, and with Endling, Reva has pulled up with her van full of discombobulated men and furious women, thrown open the doors and hollered, “Get in, losers, we’re going . . . somewhere.”