This fall, the Kenyon Virtual Book Club is teaming up with Associate Professor of English Pashmina Murthy’s class, "Books and the Booker," for a unique literary experience.
Together, we’ll read "Endling" by Maria Reva and then join in a live virtual discussion with Professor Murthy, her students and book club participants. This special collaboration offers a chance to step back into the Kenyon classroom, exchange ideas across generations and connect our current students with the vibrant Kenyon community beyond the Hill. As always, all alumni, parents and friends are invited to sign up for the book club meeting. We hope you'll join us!
"Endling" is a darkly comic, formally inventive novel set in Ukraine during the looming and then actual Russian invasion of 2022. It centers on Yeva, a passionate but struggling malacologist who travels the countryside in a makeshift mobile lab trying to save endangered snails — particularly a last-of-their-kind "endling." To fund her conservation work, she reluctantly takes gigs at romance-tour events targeting Western bachelors. Through this, Yeva meets Nastia and Solomiya, two sisters planning a dramatic revenge scheme involving a truckload of kidnapped bachelors as a stunt to find their missing activist mother. But when Russia invades, the narrative — and the novel's structure — fractures, spiraling into a bold metafiction that includes authorial intrusion, reflections on the ethics of writing about trauma and a dramatic breaking of the fourth wall. It’s a seamless blend of satire, tragedy, self-examination and inventive storytelling.
Questions? Contact Susan Apel ’83 P’16 at saapel17@gmail.com.