Quizlit’s Book of the Month September 2025 is the dazzling Endling by Maria Reva. This darkly comic novel explores survival, love, and hope in times of encroaching darkness. Longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize.
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Book of the Month September 2025
Endling by Maria Reva
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.
“Maria Reva has made a fantastic novel. It’s about so much and yet is laser focused. A scientist who funds her research with sex work, a wild and, at the same time, sensible and normal move. 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
“Brilliant and heart-stopping…Maria Reva creates beautiful, purposeful chaos….Endling is a forceful mashup of storytelling modes that call attention to its interplay of reality and fiction — a Ukrainian tragicomedy of errors colliding with social commentary about the Russian invasion.”
– Los Angeles Times
“Remarkable….Reva tests the boundaries of storytelling with freshness and humor.”
– The Washington Post
“This work on feminist outrage, environmental destruction, and the inhumanity of war is not didactic; instead, it is a page-turning, genre-bending meta-novel as entertaining as it is gut-wrenching, whose experiments with literary form will keep readers on their toes.”
– Library Journal (starred review)
“Full of suspense and humor, while never letting go of what is really happening in the lives of Ukrainian people at home and abroad…A noteworthy literary achievement and also a good story, sure to be widely discussed and enjoyed.”
– Kirkus (starred review)
“Astonishing… this inspired and urgent novel is bound to make a major splash.”
– Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)
Also by Maria Reva
A 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.
If you enjoyed our Book of the Month September 2025, check out 5 Stunning New Books for September 2025