Spellbinding, moving – evoking a fascinating region on the other side of the world – this suspenseful and haunting story announces the debut of a profoundly gifted writer. It speaks to the complex yet enduring bonds of community as it offers startlingly vivid portraits of people reaching out to one another and, sometimes, reaching back to save each other. As the story radiates from the peninsula's capital city to its rural north, we are brought to places of astonishing beauty: densely wooded forests, open expanses of tundra, soaring volcanoes, and glassy seas.ĭisappearing Earth is a multifaceted story of the intimate lives of women – their vulnerabilities and perils, their desires and dreams. Theirs is an ethnically diverse population in which racial tensions simmer, and so-called 'natives' are often suspected of the worst. Taking us one chapter per month across a year on Kamchatka, this powerful novel connects the lives of characters changed by the sisters' abduction: a witness, a neighbor, a detective, a mother. But the fear and danger of their disappearance is felt most profoundly among the women of this isolated place. In the girls' tightly-woven community, everyone must grapple with the loss. The police investigation that follows turns up nothing. One August afternoon, on the shoreline of the Kamchatka peninsula at the northeastern tip of Russia, two girls – sisters, ages eight and eleven – go missing. We are transported to vistas of rugged beauty-open expanses of tundra, soaring volcanoes, dense forests, the glassy seas that border Japan and Alaska-and into a region as complex as it is alluring, where social and ethnic tensions have long simmered, and where outsiders are often the first to be accused.For fans of Anthony Marra's A Constellation of Vital Phenomena and Téa Obreht's The Tiger's Wife: the kidnapping of two small girls on a remote peninsula in Russia sets in motion an evocative, moving, searingly original debut novel by a dazzling young writer.

Taking us through the year that follows, Disappearing Earth enters the lives of women and girls in this tightly knit community who are connected by the crime: a witness, a neighbor, a detective, a mother.

One August afternoon, two sisters-Sophia, eight, and Alyona, eleven-go missing from a beach on the far-flung Kamchatka Peninsula in northeastern Russia.

is a testament to the novel's power.” - The New York Times Book Review Phillips's deep examination of loss and longing. A propulsive, emotionally engaging debut novel about the intricate bonds of family and community, in a Russia unlike any we have seen before.

Book review disappearing earth