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Endling: A Novel
By Maria Reva. 2025
DAISY audio (Direct to player), DAISY audio (Zip)
Humourous fiction, Serious and literary fiction, Family stories
Human-narrated audio
In the absurdist literary tradition of George Saunders and Percival Everett comes a brilliant debut novel by a writer who…
is "bang-on brilliant" (Miriam Toews), about a biologist in Ukraine battling to save the country’s snail species from the brink of extinction.One of Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2025 • One of 49th Shelf's Most Anticipated 2025 Spring FictionUkraine, 2022. Yeva is a loner and a maverick scientist who lives out of her mobile lab. She scours the country’s forests and valleys, trying and failing to breed rare snails while her relatives urge her to give up, settle down and finally 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 and modernity. 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—a flamboyant protestor who vanished after years of fierce activism against the romance tours. So begins a journey of a lifetime across hundreds of miles: three angry women, a truckful of kidnapped bachelors, and Lefty, a last-of-his-kind snail with one final shot at perpetuating his species. But their plans come to a screeching halt as Russia invades. In a stunningly ambitious and achingly raw metafictional spiral, Endling brilliantly balances horror and comedy, drawing on Reva’s own experiences as a Ukrainian expat tracking her family’s delicate dance of survival behind enemy lines. As fiction and reality collide on the page, Reva probes the hard truths of war: What stories must we tell ourselves to survive? To carry on with the routines of life under military occupation? And for those of us watching from overseas: can our sense of normalcy and security ever be restored, or have they always been a fragile illusion? Endling is a tour de force from an author on the cutting edge of fiction, weaving a story of love, loss, humor, and devastation that only she can tell.See Less
We, the Kindling: A Novel
By Otoniya J. Okot Bitek. 2025
DAISY audio (Direct to player), DAISY audio (Zip)
Serious and literary fiction, Multi-cultural fiction
Human-narrated audio
As this spare and luminous novel begins, we meet Miriam, Helen and Maggie—three friends who, years ago when they were…
school children, survived capture by the Lord's Resistance Army in northern Uganda. Now, as the women go about their new lives in the city, shopping, caring for their children, planning and thinking about what the future might hold, we come to understand how deeply their past haunts the present. In graceful yet unflinching prose, Otoniya Okot Bitek weaves vivid folk tales with taut realism, revealing flashes of life before the war that ravaged Uganda, unspooling the terrible events that led to abductions of children from supposedly safe schools, and tracing perilous journeys home again. Facing endless treks across the ravaged countryside and through narrow mountain passes, gun battles and constant brutality, many girls did not survive. Those who did make it back home, some carrying small children of their own, bore the unspoken weight of their experiences within families and communities that often wished to forget and move on. In We, the Kindling, Okot Bitek insistently refuses to turn away or to spectacularize tragedy, shaping a chorus of women's voices into a hauntingly beautiful novel, suffused with care and humanity.
Endling: A Novel
By Maria Reva. 2025
Braille (Contracted), Electronic braille (Contracted), DAISY Audio (Direct to Player), DAISY Audio (Zip), DAISY text (Direct to player), DAISY text (Zip), Word (Zip), ePub (Zip)
Family stories, Serious and literary fiction, Humourous fiction
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
In the absurdist literary tradition of George Saunders and Percival Everett comes a brilliant debut novel by a writer who…
is "bang-on brilliant" (Miriam Toews), about a biologist in Ukraine battling to save the country&’s snail species from the brink of extinction. One of Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2025 • One of 49th Shelf's Most Anticipated 2025 Spring FictionUkraine, 2022. Yeva is a loner and a maverick scientist who lives out of her mobile lab. She scours the country&’s forests and valleys, trying and failing to breed rare snails, while her relatives urge her to settle down and finally 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 and modernity. 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. Together they embark on the journey of a lifetime across hundreds of miles: three angry women, a truckful of kidnapped bachelors, and Lefty, a last-of-his-kind snail with one final shot at perpetuating his species. But their plans come to a screeching halt when Russia invades. In a stunningly ambitious and achingly raw metafictional spiral, Endling brilliantly balances horror and comedy, drawing on Reva's own experiences as a Ukrainian expat tracking her family's delicate dance of survival behind enemy lines. As fiction and reality collide on the page, Reva probes the hard truths of war: What stories must we tell ourselves to survive? To carry on with the routines of life under military occupation? And for those of us watching from overseas: Can our sense of normalcy and security ever be restored, or have they always been a fragile illusion? Endling is a tour de force from an author who weaves a story of love, loss, humor, and hope that only she can tell.
We, the Kindling: A Novel
By null Otoniya J. Okot Bitek. 2025
Braille (Contracted), Electronic braille (Contracted), DAISY Audio (Direct to Player), DAISY Audio (Zip), DAISY text (Direct to player), DAISY text (Zip), Word (Zip), ePub (Zip)
Multi-cultural fiction, Serious and literary fiction
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
As this spare and luminous novel begins, we meet Miriam, Helen and Maggie—three friends who, years ago when they were…
school children, survived capture by the Lord's Resistance Army in northern Uganda. Now, as the women go about their new lives in the city, shopping, caring for their children, planning and thinking about what the future might hold, we come to understand how deeply their past haunts the present. In graceful yet unflinching prose, Otoniya Okot Bitek weaves vivid folk tales with taut realism, revealing flashes of life before the war that ravaged Uganda, unspooling the terrible events that led to abductions of children from supposedly safe schools, and tracing perilous journeys home again. Facing endless treks across the ravaged countryside and through narrow mountain passes, gun battles and constant brutality, many girls did not survive. Those who did make it back home, some carrying small children of their own, bore the unspoken weight of their experiences within families and communities that often wished to forget and move on. In We, the Kindling, Okot Bitek insistently refuses to turn away or to spectacularize tragedy, shaping a chorus of women's voices into a hauntingly beautiful novel, suffused with care and humanity.