As Rufus Redpen explains, in Maria Reva’s Endling, there is only one George Saunders. He’s the famous author who moves successfully between short- and long-form fiction, describing his lifetime of short-story writing as building custom yurts before he began construction on a mansion—a novel. “Oh, sure,” Saunders says: “I can make a mansion with a series of linked yurts.” *

Rufus is Reva’s agent, whom readers meet after reading a hundred pages of Reva’s work, which Rufus describes as “a bunch of yurts.” Publishers are only interested in mansions, he advises, aiming to provoke some Saunders-like conviction from Reva. (Rufus Redpen “sounds fictional, because he is” but, in the pages of Endling, Reva declares she has “given up on fiction” otherwise.)

Inhabiting the first—figurative—yurt is Yeva, whose nomadic lifestyle revolves around a trailer, refitted as a lab to support her conservation work with snails. In the second are two sisters working the wedding circuit, as potential bride and interpreter, participating in “Romance Tours” attended by international bachelors. One of these claims the third yurt; he returns to Ukraine to find “the one”, although he emigrated to Canada as a boy with his family. Also searching for “the one” is Lefty, an endling snail whose angled shell requires a unique mate to ensure his species’ survival. And, there are extras in a film that queries whether or not Russians and Ukrainians are really “one people”. But Rufus’ use of ‘bunch’ is apt: there are too many customised yurts to count, in only 13 chapters.

Penguin Random House – Knopf Canada (2025)

In her previous book, Good Citizens Need Not Fear (2020), Reva tidily arranged her ten yurts—stories—in 1990s Ukraine in two parts: five set “Before the Fall” and five set “After the Fall”, in and around a Soviet-style apartment-block. That collection’s line-drawings of the building also decorate two pages in Endling. (Rufus should have noted Reva’s early preoccupation with structure and destruction.) How strange it is, she tells Rufus, to be working on her second book set in Ukraine, when bombs are falling on buildings exactly like 1933 Ivansk Street. “Cruel, how Soviet apartment blocks look alike. I’ve been watching the same building get bombed, resurrected, bombed, over and over on my phone, laptop, on the TV screen at the corner store.”

What does it mean to create art during wartime, what responsibility does an artist assume when their homeland is embroiled in conflict? Instead of discussing this, Rufus embraces the yurt-talk. And, then, Reva understands her assignment: a Chapter 14 links those yurts together. All the characters’ concerns are resolved, followed by the author’s acknowledgements and biography, which identifies these 14 chapters as her debut novel A Happy Family Is But an Earlier Heaven. Except—there is another Chapter 14 (and four Chapter 44s)—and, so, the possibility that AHFIBAEH is an endling after all.

Endling stretches to 55 chapters and then some, but Reva’s writing process—and, consequentially, the narrative—is abruptly disrupted by Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Though it’s not that simple: these conflicts have deep roots. “(Immediately Yeva chided herself: the war had already been grinding on in the Donbas for eight years while the rest of the country sat around in offices and cafés and bars and went on with their days.)” With the briefest parenthetical statement, Reva disrupts readers’ expectations: she can stop her book in the middle, and her beginning wasn’t even the beginning. (Just as a minor character could be confined to the smallest yurt—a tiny refrigerator compartment, say—but tell the story of an entire era.)

Even the central characters observe the slippery nature of beginnings and endings. One yearns for fantastical influence: “If only he could charge fast enough to bend time, and go back just one month, to when his bravery was still untested, when he could imagine himself in the hypothetical.” (Which is not far removed from a novelist’s skillset.) Some hope to exert practical pressure. “You need at least three legs to make a chair, right?” one sister asks: “Here we are, the three legs, about to take the weight of social change.” The other sister observes: “Not the most stable chair, three legs.”

And, as violence destabilises the novel’s structure and characters’ lives, humour erupts.  A mother warns her daughter to act quickly. Not to escape a warzone, but her single status: “And if your new husband goes down fighting, well, at least you’ll have tried. Better to be the stoic widow of a war hero than a spinster.” One sister objects to Yeva’s insistence on procedure: “This was no committee, she reminded Yeva, just three women stranded in the middle of a war zone who had no idea where to turn, and nobody could say otherwise. Yeva pulled a dented thermos from the cup holder in her door and said, ‘Here’s some bad coffee. Now it’s a committee meeting.’” But Rufus worries about a bitter aftertaste, about “thorny brambles” between yurts.

So George Saunders is not the last of his kind—not the endling after all. Reva’s intelligent and thought-provoking fiction could fit alongside Saunders’ on bookshelves in yurts and mansions alike, alongside Viet Thanh Nguyen, David Bezmozgis, and Josip Novakovich—all of whom have also published short- and long-form fiction, as well as Paul Beatty’s poetry collections and novels. Endling’s characters engage with complex questions about bodies and borders, abduction and preservation, intimacies and incursions: who needs a mansion when a single trailer can hold all that?