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The purpose of these stories is not to unite a community around a tragedy as a less daring and more conventional narrative would have it, but to expose the ways in which the women of Kamchatka are fragmented personally, culturally and emotionally not only by the crime that jump-starts the novel, but by place, identity and the people who try, and often fail, to understand them. What follows this abduction is a novel in the form of overlapping short stories about the women who are affected both directly and indirectly by the kidnapping. It’s a familiar setup in a wholly unfamiliar setting - the remote and beautifully bleak Kamchatka Peninsula in far eastern Russia. By chapter’s end the sisters will have disappeared - kidnapped, it seems, by a man in a shiny black car.

One wants to venture deeper, the other clings to shore, embarrassed by the childish antics of her younger sibling. 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.The first chapter of Julia Phillips’s superb debut, “Disappearing Earth,” begins with two sisters at the edge of a bay on a summer day. 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.