Ukraine, 2022. Yeva is a loner and a maverick scientist who scours the country’s forests and valleys, trying and failing to breed rare snails, while her relatives urge her to settle down. 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 across hundreds of miles. But their plans come to a screeching halt when Russia invades.

A bureaucratic glitch omits an entire building, along with its residents, from municipal records. So begins Maria Reva's GOOD CITIZENS NEED NOT FEAR, nine stories that span the chaotic years leading up to and immediately following the fall of the Soviet Union. But even as the benighted denizens of 1933 Ivansk Street weather the official neglect of the increasingly powerless authorities, they devise ingenious ways to survive.