Endling

Yeva is a biologist who lives in a mobile lab and devotes her life to rescuing snails on the edge of extinction, her favorite a tree snail named Lefty who is the last of its kind, an endling. She funds the work by driving for Romeo Meets Yulia, a Canadian company that runs romance tours pairing lonely foreign men with Ukrainian women. Two sisters searching for their missing mother pull Yeva into a scheme to kidnap a busload of bachelors. Then Russia invades, and the novel breaks open, as the author Maria Reva enters the text to reckon with the impossibility of finishing a satirical book while her home country is under attack. The war, the snails, the bride business, and the writer's own anguish braid together into a single argument about telling stories in catastrophe.