Ukraine, 2022. Yeva is a maverick scientist who lives out of her mobile lab, trying and failing to breed rare snails while her relatives urge her to start a family. What they don’t know: Yeva already dates plenty of men, 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 posing as a hopeful bride and her translator while secretly searching for their missing mother --- a protestor who vanished after years of activism against the romance tours. So begins a journey of a lifetime: 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.

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.