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Summary
Summary
One of The New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year
National Book Award Finalist
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize
Finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
Finalist for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award
National Best Seller
"Splendidly imagined . . . Thrilling" --Simon Winchester
"A genuine masterpiece" --Gary Shteyngart
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.
One August afternoon, on the shoreline of the Kamchatka peninsula at the northeastern edge of Russia, two girls--sisters, eight and eleven--go missing. In the ensuing weeks, then months, the police investigation turns up nothing. Echoes of the disappearance reverberate across a tightly woven community, with the fear and loss felt most deeply among its women.
Taking us through a year in Kamchatka, Disappearing Earth enters with astonishing emotional acuity the worlds of a cast of richly drawn characters, all connected by the crime: a witness, a neighbor, a detective, a mother. We are transported to vistas of rugged beauty--densely wooded forests, open expanses of tundra, soaring volcanoes, and 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.
In a story as propulsive as it is emotionally engaging, and through a young writer's virtuosic feat of empathy and imagination, this powerful novel brings us to a new understanding of the intricate bonds of family and community, in a Russia unlike any we have seen before.
Author Notes
Julia Phillips is a Fulbright Fellow whose writing has appeared in The New York Times , The Atlantic , The Moscow Times, and The Paris Review . She lives in Brooklyn.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In the opening chapter of Phillips's exceptional and suspenseful debut, two sisters-Sofia, 8, and Alyona, 11-vanish from a beach on the Kamchatka Peninsula in northeastern Russia, and their disappearance sends ripples throughout the close-knit community. The subsequent 12 chapters, taking place during the months over the following year, chart the impact of the potential kidnapping-and the destructive effect of longing and loss-and play out in a series of interconnected and equally riveting stories about others in the surrounding area. "April" peeks into the day-to-day of a policeman's restless wife, who, while on maternity leave, is haunted by missed opportunities and "[craves] things darker, stranger, out of bounds." In "May," shrewlike Oksana, the abduction's only witness, severs ties with a colleague after the colleague's absentminded husband loses Oksana's beloved dog. The penultimate chapter unites some of the book's disparate threads, and follows Sofia and Alyona's anxious and emotionally ravaged mother, Marina, as she meets a photographer at a solstice festival who uncovers a potential link to an earlier unsolved missing-persons case and an important clue about who the perpetrator of both crimes might be. The discovery leads to a truly nail-biting climax and the novel's shocking conclusion that even eagle-eyed readers might not see coming. Phillips's exquisite descriptions of the desolate landscape and the "empty, rolling earth" are masterful throughout, as is her skill at crafting a complex and genuinely addictive whodunit. This novel signals the arrival of a mighty talent. Agent: Suzanne Gluck, WME Entertainment. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A year in the lives of women and girls on an isolated peninsula in northeastern Russia opens with a chilling crime.In the first chapter of Phillips' immersive, impressive, and strikingly original debut, we meet sisters Alyona and Sophia, ages 11 and 8, amusing themselves one August afternoon on the rocky shoreline of a public beach on the waterfront of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, a city on Russia's remote Kamchatka peninsula. They are offered a ride home by a seemingly kind stranger. After he drives right past the intersection that leads to the apartment they share with their mother, they disappear from their previous lives and, to a large extent, from the narrative. The rest of the book is a series of linked stories about a number of different women on the peninsula, all with the shadow of the missing girls hanging over them as a year goes by since their disappearance. Another young girl with a single mom loses her best friend to new restrictions imposed by the other girl's anxious mother. The daughter of a reindeer herder from the north, at college in the city, finds her controlling boyfriend clamping down harder than ever. In a provincial town, members of a family whose teenage daughter disappeared four years earlier are troubled by the similarities and differences between their case and this one. The book opens with both a character list and a mapyou'll be looking at both often as you find your footing and submerge ever more deeply in this world, which is both so different from and so much like our own. As the connections between the stories pile up and tighten, you start to worrywill we ever get closure about the girls? Yes, we will. And you'll want to start over and read it again, once you know.An unusual, cleverly constructed thriller that is also a deep dive into the culture of a place many Americans have probably never heard of, illuminating issues of race, culture, sexual attraction, and the transition from the U.S.S.R. to post-Soviet Russia. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
The volcano-spiked Kamchatka Peninsula in Far East Russia, where the tundra still supports herds of reindeer and the various Native groups who depend on them, is the evocative setting of Phillips' accomplished and gripping episodic novel. In the region's largest city, Petropavlovsk-Kamschatsky, Russians are disparaging of Natives and migrant workers, and nearly everyone struggles with limited means and options. That's why researcher Oksana notices the clean, new car carrying a man and two young, bird-boned Russian girls and reports her sighting when news breaks that two sisters, living with their single mother, a journalist, are missing. This abduction forms the hub of Phillips' atmospheric drama of shock and despair, each radiating spoke the story of a woman affected by the painful mystery, including a customs officer, a detective's lonely wife, a student, and the head of a village cultural center whose 18-year-old daughter has also vanished. In fresh and unpredictable scenes depicting broken friendships and failed marriages, strained family gatherings, drunken sauna parties, a camping trip, and rehearsals of a Native dance troupe, Phillips' spellbinding prose is saturated with sensuous nuance and emotional intensity as she subtly traces the shadows of Russia's past and illuminates today's daunting complexities of gender and identity, expectations and longing.--Donna Seaman Copyright 2019 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Lost and profoundly myopic souls abound in Tanen's tale - the Y.A. author's debut adult novel - of two dysfunctional families. Marty Kessler, a 75-year-old retired movie producer who "made the geeks the heroes long before that idea had occurred to anyone else," is a mess. As are his adult daughters, Janine and Amanda. The cause? Perhaps Hollywood, an industry Marty considers "fundamentally corrupt and immoral," or perhaps the Kesslers' own tendencies: They have always "glossed over the horrors" of their lives. And there are many. His fortune is dwindling, a manipulative girlfriend wants what's left, and family unity eludes him. His daughters have been at loggerheads ever since Janine was a child television star. At 41, Janine is fragile and reclusive, avoiding both the world at large and that of "fallen celebrity." Amanda functions, but is jealous, divorcing and raising competitively bratty twin girls. To top it all off, Marty's addicted to opioids. Is this a way to kill time, because he's old and nobody cares "how decent a man he'd once been, how dedicated a father he was, or how many Academy Awards he had"? Bunny Small, newly 70, is the rich and famous author of a supremely successful Y.A. series. Biting and cruel, she's been hiding in her London flat, stricken by the writer's block she doesn't believe in, drinking uncontrollably. "Bunny wasn't dead but she wouldn't have minded if she had been." Her only child, Henry, decamped to Los Angeles at 22 after "a life of humiliation and parental neglect," and he's now an art history professor. Bunny explains the separation as her son's "decades-long hissy fit because she'd named the little hero in her novels after him." Where do the orbits of these families intersect? Marty and Bunny, wedded briefly long ago, end up at the same Malibu rehab, setting up a romantic-comedy-style meetcute involving their respective offspring. The oft-mined tropes here would have benefited from more original insights and deeper humor, and the novel's tone never fully settles; still, one wholeheartedly hopes that they all find some measure of future happiness.
Library Journal Review
DEBUT In her dazzlingly original debut novel, Phillips imagines a cold, desolate climate inhabited by characters who exude warmth and strength. This cinematic setting is the far eastern Russian peninsula, Kamchatka, where white Russians and indigenous tribes uneasily coexist. In the chilling opening chapter, two sisters vanish after a day at the beach, and though a witness describes seeing them with a man in a shiny black car, the authorities come up empty. Three years earlier in a village many hours further north, a Native girl also disappears, but she is dismissed as a runaway. Phillips cleverly weaves these two incidents through subsequent chapters that cover a year in the lives of her many vividly drawn characters, illustrating the subtle effects of racism on the investigation. Themes of dark and light pervade the narrative. Outsiders, those with darker skin or hair, are blamed for an uptick in crime. Prejudice blinds people to the truth until two grieving mothers, brought together by a photographer with a penchant for nosing into other people's business, manage to see past their differences to their shared loss and courage. VERDICT Phillips, a Fulbright fellow whose work has appeared in Slate and the Atlantic, has written a knock-out novel that combines literary heft with a propulsive plot. [See Prepub Alert, 12/3/18.]-Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.