---
title: "Brides, snails and pickle missiles"
date: "2026-10-22T12:13:15+01:00"
modified: "2026-10-22T12:13:16+01:00"
url: "https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/brides-snails-and-pickle-missiles/"
post_id: 11053
---

# Brides, snails and pickle missiles

![](https://newhumanist.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/10/ACP08432-1200x800.jpg)War broke out while Maria Reva was writing her latest novel set in Ukraine – so she incorporated it into the storyline. Credit: Anya ChibisMaria Reva writes fiction and opera libretti. She is the author of *Good Citizens Need Not Fear*, set in an apartment block in Ukraine, as well as *Endling*, a genre-bending tale set during the ongoing Russia–Ukraine conflict. She was born in Ukraine and grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia. We spoke to her about smashing stereotypes and wartime platitudes, and the power of fiction.

**Your novel *Endling* is about, among other things, a bridal agency in Ukraine and endangered snails. Where did those ideas come from?**

Those were two obsessions I was working with simultaneously. One was the romance tours that used to take place in Ukraine before the full-scale invasion. It fascinated me – all of these men are going abroad thinking that their dreams are going to be answered somewhere else. What does that say about our own western environment, and loneliness, and the rift between the genders?

Then I read this wonderful article in *The Atlantic* by Ed Yong called “The Last of Its Kind” about endangered snails and the snail die-off. That was the first time I came across the word “endling” \[meaning the last known member of a species\], and it’s kind of a cutesy word, but it’s actually really heartbreaking. And it just kind of came together. It was really fun for me as a writer to fit that puzzle together.

**One of the potential “brides” is secretly using the service to raise funds and save endangered snails. It’s already a remarkable concept. But then, while you were writing the novel, Russia invades Ukraine.**

Yes, and I gave up on fiction for a while. I couldn’t just continue the novel business as usual, as if there was no invasion happening in the real world. The setting of the novel was being destroyed in real time, and there was no way around that, even in the fictional world of the book. So I wanted to take the reader with me, to explore this conundrum that I was having: How can fiction contain the realities of our world right now? And what is it like to be an ordinary person as these huge sweeps of history are coming about?

**Your characters have to deal with the invasion, but you also put your own voice, as the author, into the book, in a post-modern playful way.**

Some people really don’t like the experimental parts of the novel, and wish it had continued as a straight narrative, whereas other people thought it really takes off when we break out of that mould. It’s been generating a lot of conversation about the nature of fiction, which I’m pleased about.

I have a very personal connection to the war, because my relatives are there, and I was born in Ukraine, so a lot of these places that are being destroyed are the places of my childhood. I have one foot in that, and one foot out of it as a Canadian, and there’s a lot of guilt associated with that. There’s a sense of “Am I doing enough, from my place of relative peace?”

I think that’s why this book has resonated with so many people all over the world. I’ve just heard from a member of the Lebanese diaspora, talking about this feeling of watching what’s happening now in Lebanon from abroad, about having elderly relatives who refuse to leave the country, the kind of powerlessness that you feel.

**Your writing also draws on black humour and the absurd. Does humour help to cope with the terrors of war?**

It’s quite remarkable the kind of humour that is still very much alive in Ukraine, and in the diaspora community. There are so many memes flying around. In the opening days of the invasion, even the Ministry of Defence, some of their social media output was darkly humorous – it’s a way to diminish the enemy. In contrast, there were some people here in Canada who didn’t even want to say Putin’s name, almost like he was Voldemort in the Harry Potter books. But that gives him more power. The Ukrainian approach has been the opposite.

**The novel mentions the meme of the woman throwing a jar of pickles at a drone, which quickly went global.**

Yes, she became a hero. Another example was the sharing of photos of highway signage replacing the place names with “hell” in either direction, for the invading Russians.

***Endling* attacks wartime platitudes, but also tropes about Ukraine and Ukrainian women in particular.**

I personally have been confronted by the stereotype \[of the Slavic woman\]. Sometimes people make certain assumptions about me, or they comment on my physicality. My sister had an interaction with an American fellow on a plane – as soon as she said she was born in Ukraine, he said, “Oh, I would love a Ukrainian girl for a wife, because American women are so ambitious and aggressive,” making all these presumptions about her. And the more of these stories I heard, the angrier I got.

At first I didn’t want to write about so-called “mail order brides”. But then I chose to write straight into the cliche and turn it on its head and complicate it. I create these women who have their own reasons to be part of the romance tours, they don’t want to be “saved” and taken to the rich west. And some of the book is about activism against the industry as well.

**Two of the women are activists, or at least become involved in activism, and the other is saving endangered snails.**

Yeva is one of those people who actually don’t do well in peacetime. At the beginning of the novel, she has given up on her snail breeding mission, because the endlings are dwindling in her mobile lab, and she’s dejected about the state of the world, the way many of us are. But once the full-scale invasion hits, she snaps into this incredible focus. Reality condenses into bands of action, and once she’s presented with the possibility of finding a mate for one of her endlings, there’s no other way around it. She’s going to find that snail, even if it’s in occupied territory.

That’s something I’m interested in: how different human minds work under different circumstances, peacetime versus crisis.

**What are you working on now?**

I’m working on an opera with my sister, composer Anna Pidgorna. The theme is the cycle of occupations of southern Ukraine – the Nazi occupation and the Soviet reoccupation, and now, of course, the Russian occupation of various parts of Ukraine. It’s about siblings who were children during World War Two, who had to learn their occupiers’ songs, marching songs, in order to survive. Now they’re grappling with the question, are they going to do that again with the Russians? So it’s also about the infectious quality of music.

**What role does creative storytelling play in encouraging readers to continue caring about the war in Ukraine and the people still enduring it?**

Fiction brings the reader into those moments of wartime that the news cycle will never be able to capture, because what the news captures is the atrocities, the casualty numbers, but there’s the other side of it, where people are trying to continue living their normal lives, clinging on to those small joys, like having a coffee and croissant at their favourite cafe.

If you’re reading a novel, and you get attached to the characters, you learn about the war through their eyes and you digest material that you might not have been able to absorb another way. No matter the setting, that’s the power of fiction: to take the reader deeply into another person’s psyche.