The last of her kind

Novelist's Ukraine-set dark feminist satire twists and turns around a very real existential threat.

- CHERYL PEARL SUCHER

What do you do when you're a Ukrainian-born Canadian fiction writer deep into the composition of your first novel, which is set in your homeland and written in the absurdist, dark comedic tradition of Kundera, Kafka and Hašek, when Russia suddenly invades your home country, your relatives start fleeing to safety while bombs explode all around them, and your beloved grandfather refuses to leave Kherson, which is being eviscerated in real time? How can you keep on writing imaginatively when atrocities are being perpetrated against innocents in your homeland? Can you keep on living as before, when your reality has dramatically split in two?

BY CHERYL PEARL SUCHER ENDLING by Maria Reva (Little Brown, $38)

Such was the dilemma facing Maria Reva while working on Endling. At first, she was seized by panic and debilitating self-questioning. She stopped writing the novel; fiction seemed a folly during times of existential crisis. The only way she could conceive of completing the novel was to fold all those questions into the trajectory of the plot. She did that by breaking the fourth wall: inserting herself as a character narrating her own experience of stopping writing the novel to travel through her war-torn homeland. What began as fiction ended in nonfiction, making