Good Neighbours
with Ashraf Zaghal and Maria Reva
Hosted by Peter Schneider
In Person Streaming Fiction Politics History
“Maria Reva creates beautiful, purposeful chaos. Informed by deep personal loss, her startling metafictional debut novel, Endling, is a forceful mashup of storytelling modes that call attention to its interplay of reality and fiction—a Ukrainian tragicomedy of errors colliding with social commentary about the Russian invasion.”
With humane prose that brings readers to Palestine and Ukraine, we are invited to share in the struggles and triumphs of lives lived in the shadow of history’s deepest scars. Join us for an evening of fiction that spotlights the many ways conflict and political unrest impact civilian lives.
In Seven Heavens Away by Ashraf Zaghal, a Palestinian teenager comes of age amid escalating violence in Jerusalem. After their friend Hassan is killed, Aziz and Mustafa are shaken to their core, drawn into the orbit of Hassan's father—a respected community leader known for his charity and fiery speeches—as they grapple with grief, guilt, and an uncertain future. As Aziz’s forbidden feelings for Dafna, a Jewish girl, deepen and his mother searches for a way to secure his safety, he’s forced to confront painful truths about loss, survival, and what it means to find hope amid the ruins.
Endling by Maria Reva, winner of the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Gordon Burns Prize, is a stunning debut novel about a biologist in Ukraine battling to save the country’s snail species from the brink of extinction on the eve of the Russian invasion. Ukraine, 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. 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?
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