Maria Reva
In conversation with Senator Paula Simons
Saturday, October 17 | 7 PM
Forsyth Hall, Downtown Library | $10
Endling:
In Maria Reva’s darkly comic novel, Endling, a biologist and two sisters in Ukraine kidnap a busload of Western bachelors to stage a protest against the international romance-tour industry.
Their wildly absurd plot is abruptly and horrifically derailed when Russia launches its 2022 full-scale invasion of the country.
Longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize.
Winner of the 2025 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize
Amazon First Novel Award Winner
Finalist for the 2025 Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction
About Maria Reva
Maria Reva is a Ukrainian-born, Canada-raised writer and opera librettist. Her fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, McSweeney’s, and The Best American Short Stories, earning her a National Magazine Award. Her debut novel was longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, won the 2025 Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and was also recognized as an Amazon First Novel Award winner and a finalist for the 2025 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction.
Endling
An unforgettable debut novel about the journey of three women and one extremely endangered snail through contemporary Ukraine
Ukraine, 2022. Yeva is a scientist who scours the country, 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.
Senator Simons is a member of the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications and the Standing Senate Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs, and the past deputy chair of the Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry.
Appointed to the Senate of Canada in 2018, Senator Paula Simons has been a CBC radio producer and documentary maker, a playwright, and a popular historian. She spent 23 years with the Edmonton Journal as a reporter and opinion writer, winning two National Newspaper Awards, one for investigative journalism and one for column-writing. She earned a further six National Newspaper Award citations of merit for her columns and editorials on Alberta politics.
Her work has also been recognized with awards and honours from the UNESCO Canadian Committee for World Press Freedom, Journalists for Human Rights, the Alberta Centre for Civil Liberties Research, the Canadian Bar Association, the Canadian Mental Health Association, the American Society for Features Journalism and the Edmonton Historical Board.
