2025 Booker Longlist: Endling by Maria Reva

Book number seven for our panel is one of the few debut novels that made the list this year. So what did our panel think of the book?

Maria Reva is a writer and storyteller known for her sharp wit and imaginative worlds. Born in Ukraine and raised in Canada, she often blends dark humor with surreal twists to capture the strangeness of everyday life. Her award-winning story collection, Good Citizens Need Not Fear, has been praised for its mix of absurdity and heart. Endling is her debut novel.

Book Synopsis from Booker website: Ukraine, 2022. Yeva is a maverick scientist who scours the country’s forests and valleys, trying and failing to breed rare snails while her relatives urge her to settle down and 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.  
  
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.  
  
So begins a journey of a lifetime across a country on the brink of war: three angry women, a truckful of kidnapped bachelors, and Lefty, a last-of-his-kind snail with one final shot at perpetuating his species

Jen’s Thoughts: I adored this book and thus far it is my favorite selection from the longlist. I am a big fan of metafiction and this book ticked all my boxes: strong writing, dark humor, balance of humor and the tragic, and searing commentary. The book was bold and creative, emotionally evocative (in a good way), and I didn’t want it to end. I normally don’t love when authors inject themselves too much into a narrative but this was so clever and powerful, that I couldn’t help but feel a bit awestruck. Reva utilizes multiple voices, authorial inserts, correspondence, and shifting formats to explore issues around storytelling in the midst of war — how narrative is formed, and marketed and how writers wrestle with the ethics of telling a war story.

This is another book that is jam-packed with things to think about and it likely requires multiple readings to fully appreciate. While the novel centers around the break that occurs during the Russian invasion of Urkaine, it also tackles feminism and the mail-order-bride industry, environmental conservation, and the devastation of war. Symbolism and connections between seemingly unconnected story threads fill this book. The term “Endling” refers to the last remaining member of a species and the protagonist is a conservationist dedicated to trying to save the last of the snails. There is a lot of detail about snails in the novel but snails represent so much more with their spiral shells representing the cycle of life and death and in some ways paralleling the narrative structure of the book. In the words of Pervical Everett (who also happens to be one of my favorite authors), this book is simply “fantastic.”

Writing quality: 5/5
Originality: 5/5
Character development: 4/4
Plot development: 4/4
Overall enjoyment: 2/2
Total: 20/20

Nicole’s Thoughts:  This is a little weird, but the more I read of Flashlight, the more I appreciate Endling. That’s not to say that I don’t like Flashlight, I do … but I didn’t feel as gaga about Endling as everybody else seems to be. Please don’t get me wrong. I liked it and my score seems to suggest I liked it more than I think I did … and welcome to my brain. Haha.

I liked the Ukraine story and perspective, I love how we looked at something like the bridal industry and transitioned to the war. I enjoyed the characters. I thought the snail situation was a bit incidental, even as a metaphor and some of the “meta” nature of the book bugged me. You already have a lot going on, I don’t really need a Yurt-cameo. Felt like an unnecessary name drop.

Anyway, solid story – certainly not an overdone topic, and well told. To me, this is not a Booker book and I almost took it off my predictions list and then I would have gotten zero right.

Writing quality: 4/5
Originality: 4/5
Character development: 4/4
Plot development: 4/4
Overall enjoyment: 2/2
Total: 18/20

Anita’s Thoughts: One of my favorite authors is George Saunders, and as I read this book, I couldn’t help but think, wow, this narrative reminds me so much of Saunders. Imagine my surprise when he was actually referenced within the story. Witty, tender, and clever, I mostly appreciated what the author was trying to do. At times, it devolved a bit into a caper, and that’s where I felt less enthused.

Writing quality: 4/5
Originality: 5/5
Character development: 3/4
Plot development: 3/4
Overall enjoyment: 2/2
Total: 17/20

Tracy’s Thoughts: Thanks, Anita! I was trying to figure out whose writing style this reminded me of! I liked the caper parts, and the lengths our MC would go just to get a snail some hubba hubba. Another one I read before the list was announced, and would happily reread.

Writing quality: 5/5
Originality: 5/5
Character development: 4/4
Plot development: 3/4
Overall enjoyment: 2/2
Total:19 /20

Lisa’s Thoughts: This book really blew me away. I loved how Maria Reva took seemingly disparate topics — the international marriage market, feminist protest (okay, so that could be connected to the marriage market), Ukrainian immigrants to Canada, and snails — and wove them together into a story about what it is people want and care about. It’s a story, perhaps a caper, that moves along…. And then everything changes when Russia invades. Not just the content and tone of the story, but also ways in which the narrative is structured. Because U.S. politics loom so large in my psyche right now, I have been annoyed with books that are focused on the micro-personal and that don’t acknowledge political context. And, I was reading this story on days when IRL, Trump met with Putin, and Zelenskyy visited the White House, and Putin wants to keep Ukrainian land as part of a peace deal. Endling is the perfect book for this moment and reminds us of how personal longings and geopolitical changes (read: military invasions) all mix within our own lives.

Writing quality: 5/5
Originality: 5/5
Character development: 4/4
Plot development: 4/4
Overall enjoyment: 2/2
Total: 20/20

Rankings
1. Endling: 18.8
2. Audition: 17.88
3. Universality: 14.5
4. The South: 14.25
5. Flashlight: 14.2
6. One Boat: 13
7. Love forms: 10.5

Have you read it?  What do you think? Want to try it for yourself? You can purchase your copy here: Endling