Endling - Hardcover

Reva, Maria

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385545312 ISBN 13: 9780385545310

Verlag: Doubleday Books, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

Set 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 the impact of war.

"This novel turns corners and tables. I love works that are smarter than I am, and this is one.”– Percival Everett, author of National Book Award-winner James

"Funny and smart. This is essential reading.”– Ann Patchett, bestselling author of Tom Lake

"Pulses with a powerful sense of urgency and relevance to our times."–Lara Prescott, author of The Secrets We Kept

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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

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1

Anastasia, the girl called herself. Achingly young—too young, thought Yeva, to be taking part in the romance tours. Yeva would be getting talked at by some bachelor, and from across the banquet room or yacht deck she’d notice the girl watching her intently, round blank face trained on her like a telescope dish. That face, normally flat and deadened, as if the girl had long ago checked out, twitched, tried to wink, send a signal to Yeva, now that the girl’s handler had loosened her clutches. Help. Maybe the girl was being trafficked, who knew. Once, the girl followed her to the parking lot and watched as Yeva got into her trailer. She was probably longing to get in, too, be whisked away somewhere safe before her “interpreter” caught up with her, quick and officious, and yanked her away by the elbow.

Rumor had it the girl was into God. Of course she was, sad thing. The religious ones made the perfect victims, used to bowing under threat from above. In the past Yeva would have risen to the rescue, but she was done caring. All those earthly worries she used to have—mollusk conservation, romantic prospects, the Russian tanks amassing at the border and how no one believed anything would come of it except Yeva, who according to her family was always crying wolf and blowing everything out of proportion, prattling on about the collapse of this ecosystem or that, ruining all the fun, ruining, on behalf of barely there river turtles, the marriage agency’s balloon release over the Dnipro—blah blah blah. None of it mattered anymore. Even Yeva was tired of Yeva.

How Yeva became involved with the romance tours: a blue-eyed blonde had approached her at a gas station as she was refueling her mobile lab. The woman had seemingly materialized out of nowhere. This was on the dusty outskirts of some backwater town after another expedition (a success: two gastropod survivors found). As Yeva watched the numbers tick up on the diesel pump gauge, her tank taking forever to fill, the woman chatted on about the weather. Then she told Yeva about an “opportunity” to get free headshots.

When Yeva asked what in hell she’d need headshots for, the stranger seemed taken aback, like Yeva had just turned down a free lottery ticket. She recovered quickly. “Pardon me, I hope you don’t mind my saying so,” the woman said in a low secretive voice (which surely was part of her script, too), “I just thought you might be an aspiring model.”

Had Yeva’s family sent the woman, in their latest matchmaking scheme? Had they stooped as low as that, plotting to send portraits of her to any viable suitor?

When the fuel pump clicked off, Yeva tore her credit card from its slot (the payment authorized, she saw with relief) and began her usual maintenance check of the mobile lab. Some idiot had graffitied FREE CANDY on the expanse of white on the trailer’s side. Yeva swore under her breath, continued the check. Kneeling by the front wheel, she had already forgotten the woman when a chirping voice asked from above, “Nice RV. Are you on holiday?”

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.

The woman told her about a party at the hotel in town that night. Did she want to come?

Yeva climbed into the driver’s seat, about to slam the door on the stranger.

“Free entry for the ladies. There’s a thousand-dollar raffle.” The woman emphasized, “USD.”

That Saturday night was the first time Yeva had ever won anything. She’d stayed through the entire party, waiting for the winner to be announced at 2:00 a.m., tipping back free rosé at an empty corner table as more blue-eyed blondes in tight club dresses and stilettos wriggled around her to the thumping music. The hotel: self-consciously second-tier, the faded carpet patterned with crowns and the letters VIP. The wine tasted like acid reflux; back in that golden time, Yeva was still full of hope and cared what alcohol tasted like. There were a few men there, foreigners dressed like they’d just come from a ball game, accompanied by interpreters. Some of them tried to yell words at Yeva over the crackling loudspeakers beside her. Their interpreters gestured, urging Yeva to follow them to a quieter place: Photo booth? Outside? Anywhere but beside these earsplitting speakers? Yeva stayed in her spot, ignoring whatever this was—an afterparty of diplomats? A corporate retreat?—eyes on her phone in case of an alarm from her lab, until at last the hall went silent and a matronly woman in a powder-blue pantsuit stood at a tippy lectern, introduced herself by an ancient-sounding name, Efrosinia, and began rattling off the raffle numbers.

Before the romance tours, Yeva had relied on government and NGO grants, which had dwindled in recent years. Who wants to fund the research on functionally extinct species? People like Yeva are never the stars of environmental summits and galas, prattling on and on about yet another battle lost, yet another species gone down the chute. Donors only want to fund winners.

That evening, holding the raffle money in her hands, for the first time in her life Yeva felt like a winner. Later she suspected that the raffle was rigged in favor of newcomers to pull them into more of these weird parties, but winning felt good at the time. And one thousand USD got her far: a new multi-stage filtration and misting system, specialized full-spectrum lighting with automated dimming, a sanitization chamber for soil (secondhand, but still good), more realistic terrarium landscaping that included live moss.

Soon Yeva started going on dates with the foreigners. The work—though she’d never admit it to the whiny interpreters—was easy. She quickly understood that the marriage agency didn’t expect her to actually marry any of the men it carted in from the West. Sure, a few women really were there to find love—“Needles,” they were unofficially called. But then there was everyone else, the shining golden hay, just there to populate the parties, show up for a date or two, keep the bride-to-bachelor ratio high. Yeva didn’t mind being the agency’s shimmering bait, her headshot plastered all over their website. Let these men come here to look for their Needles in the hay. The hunt must be part of the thrill, she figured, what kept some men coming back tour after tour. Meanwhile, women like Yeva—nicknamed “Brides”—could also return tour after tour and, without bending any rules, make decent money. In fact, the agency endorsed the practice: any gifts ordered by bachelors through the agency—gym membership, cooking class, customizable charm bracelet—could be redeemed by the brides for cash from the agency offices. And most reliably, the hourly interpreter fee had to be split with brides after each date (this, with a great condescending sigh from the interpreters, as if they were being charitable, as if they were doing all the work). Even if the brides spoke English, which Yeva and many others did, the bachelors were not allowed to converse with the brides without these middle-women present. Translation apps on phones were also no-nos. What’s less romantic than a lady and gentleman on a date, eyes glued to their phones? Translation apps drained transnational love of its mystique, Efrosinia and her assistants lamented. Yeva had heard of brides who went further than receiving and redeeming gifts, who outright scammed the men through kickbacks with overpriced restaurants,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Doubleday Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0385545312
• ISBN 13: 9780385545310
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 338
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Doubleday; https://knopfdoubleday.com/imprint/doubleday/; ; Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY, 14-1; NEW YORK; NY; 10019; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland