Endling

Endling is a novel by the writer Maria Reva, published in 2025 by Doubleday. It is set in Ukraine in the year of the Russian invasion, and it follows three women whose lives meet through a business that sells the idea of Ukrainian brides.

Yeva is a maverick biologist who lives out of her mobile laboratory, driving the country's forests and valleys in search of endangered snails. Many of the snails she finds are endlings, the last of their species, and her attempts to breed them keep failing while her family urges her to give up the work, settle down and start a family of her own. The money for the research comes from a Canadian company that runs romance tours, where Western men pay to meet Ukrainian women and may select one as a bride.

Nastia and her older sister Solomiya come to the agency for a different reason: their mother, a feminist activist, disappeared eight months earlier, and Nastia poses as a prospective bride while Sol translates. The sisters plan to kidnap a group of the paying bachelors and use the scandal to expose the trade, and their plan and Yeva's work collide with the invasion that begins on the same day.