Maria Reva Knihy

An unforgettable debut novel about the journey of three women and one extremely endangered snail through contemporary Ukraine'Brilliant ... funny and smart, full of science, longing and adventure, all the while reminding us what the world stands to lose, and what it has already lost. This is essential reading' ANN PATCHETT'A fantastic novel' PERCIVAL EVERETT'Heartbreaking, hilarious, profound, and vital, Endling is a brilliant, visceral journey that pulses with a powerful sense of urgency and relevance to our times' LARA PRESCOTTUkraine, 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.

'Bright, funny, satirical and relevant. . . . A new talent to watch!' MARGARET ATWOOD (via Twitter)'Bang-on brilliant' MIRIAM TOEWSThis brilliant and bitingly funny novel-in-stories, set in and around a single crumbling apartment building in Soviet-era Ukraine, heralds the arrival of a major new talent.'A comic triumph' GLOBE AND MAILA cast of unforgettable characters--citizens of the small industrial town of Kirovka--populate Maria Reva's ingeniously entwined tales that span the chaotic years leading up to and immediately following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989. Weaving the strands of the narrative together is an unforgettable, chameleon-like young woman named Zaya: an orphan turned beauty-pageant crasher who survives the extraordinary circumstances of her childhood through a compelling combination of ferocity, intelligence, stubbornness and wit.Inspired by her own family's history, Reva's Good Citizens Need Not Fear takes us from paranoia to tenderness and back again, exploring what it is to be an individual amid the roiling forces of history.'Luminous' YANN MARTEL'Outstanding' ANTHONY DOERR'Maria Reva's enthralling debut of interlinked short stories achieves the double effect of timelessness and timeliness' KAPKA KASSABOVA, GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE DAY