Narrator Ilyana Kadushin skillfully meets the challenges of this genre-bending audiobook. Set in modern-day Kamchatka, the story revolves around the disappearance of two young sisters and is told through the eyes of different women or girls whose lives have been variously affected by the kidnappings. Kadushin modulates her tone to fit each woman’s age and circumstances, highlighting, for example, a young dancer’s tentative disloyalty to her controlling boyfriend, a teen’s dismay over losing a friend, and a potential witness’s uncertainty about what she saw. These vignettes evoke details of life on the northern Russian peninsula, particularly emphasizing gender, cultural, socioeconomic, and generational divides. Kadushin’s pronunciations of the non-English words enhance the setting, and her delivery of the dialogue flows at a natural tempo. C.B.L. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

"I cannot speak too highly of Julia Phillips's thrilling, impeccably written and splendidly imagined story, set with rigorous attention to detail in one of the most volcanically dangerous and beautifully remote corners of the planet.  An exciting beginning from an author whose literary future looks set to be stellar.”
—Simon Winchester

“Julia Phillips is at once a careful cartographer and gorgeous storyteller. Written with passion and patience, this is the story of a people and the land that shapes them. A mystery of two missing girls burns at the center of this astonishing debut, and the complexity of ethnicity, gender, hearth and kin illuminates this question and many more.”
—Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage

"A genuine masterpiece, but one that is easily consumed in a feverish stay-up-all-night bout of reading pleasure. It's as much a portrait of humanity as of a small Kamchatka community."
—Gary Shteyngart

“Brilliant, spectacular—a wonderful book. Julia Phillips’s exquisite, detailed writing drew me in from the very first page of Disappearing Earth. I fell in love with each and every poignantly rendered character, even as I couldn’t keep my eyes off the central mystery of the two missing girls. The novel is both a riveting page-turner and a gorgeous exploration of love, one that circles around a magnetic core of loss. It has lodged itself deep in my heart.” 
—Jean Kwok, author of Girl in Translation

“Suspenseful, original and compelling,  Disappearing Earth is a strange and haunting voyage into a strange and haunting world—the faraway Kamchatka in Russia's Far East, which is brought by this debut novelist to eerie, vibrant and unsettling life.”
—Simon Sebag-Montefiore, author of The Romanovs 

“Julia Phillips’s novel is vividly real, but it reads at times like a suspenseful fairy tale. Here are portraits of different women with a shared yearning for autonomy, in a land inhospitable to it. Here, too, is a story in which, against all odds, they do not give up hope. Disappearing Earth is a brave, affecting accomplishment.” 
—Christine Schutt, author of Pure Hollywood 

“Disappearing Earth is a rare achievement: haunting and complex; intense yet subtle; sophisticated yet unputdownable; moving yet never sentimental; foreign yet somehow familiar. And it snaps shut at the end with dark poise. Julia Phillips possesses a unique talent, and I can’t wait for her next book.” 
—Lorraine Adams, author of Harbor 
  
“This exquisite debut reads like a secret being whispered to your ears only. Julia Phillips so smoothly evokes the quiet rage, breathtaking tenderness and searing discomfort of a human connection.”
—Suki Kim, author of Without You, There is No Us

“Julia Phillips writes in clean, sharp lines that belie an almost frightening depth, and a clarity of eye that renders a complex and gut-wrenching vision of the Kamchatka region and its people. More than once, I gawped at this book: there are no seams, no sentimentality, not a single untrue thought from start to finish. With Disappearing Earth, Phillips accomplishes in her first book what most writers can't glimpse in a lifetime.”
—Bill Cheng, author of Southern Cross the Dog

“Disappearing Earth is not only a viscerally wide-ranging introduction to the land and culture of the Kamchatka Peninsula, as well as a missing persons thriller—as beautifully written as it was, I still couldn’t turn the pages fast enough—it’s also a wrenching meditation on the agonies of those losses to which we never fully adjust.  This is a dazzlingly impressive first novel.”  
—Jim Shepard, author of The Book of Aron

“A feat of literary suspense. I felt like a wide-eyed kid reading Julia Phillips's Disappearing Earth. I could live in her portrayal of this remote part of the world forever.”
—Sloane Crosley, author of I Was Told There’d Be Cake

“An exceptional and suspenseful debut. In the opening chapter, two sisters vanish from a beach on the Kamchatka Peninsula; their disappearance sends ripples throughout the close-knit community. Subsequent chapters chart the effect of longing and loss in a series of interconnected, equally riveting stories. The climax [is] truly nail-biting . . . Phillips’s exquisite descriptions of the landscape are masterful throughout, as is her skill at crafting a complex, genuinely addictive whodunit. This novel signals the arrival of a mighty talent.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred, boxed review)

“[An] immersive, impressive, strikingly original debut. . . an unusual, cleverly constructed thriller, and also a deep dive into the culture of Russia’s remote Kamchatka peninsula. Disappearing Earth opens with a chilling crime . . . The rest of the book is about different women on the peninsula, all with the shadow of the missing girls hanging over them as a year goes by. You submerge ever more deeply into this world, which is both so different from and so much like our own. Will we ever get closure about the girls? You’ll want to start over and read it again once you know.”
—Kirkus (starred review)

Narrator Ilyana Kadushin skillfully meets the challenges of this genre-bending audiobook. Set in modern-day Kamchatka, the story revolves around the disappearance of two young sisters and is told through the eyes of different women or girls whose lives have been variously affected by the kidnappings. Kadushin modulates her tone to fit each woman’s age and circumstances, highlighting, for example, a young dancer’s tentative disloyalty to her controlling boyfriend, a teen’s dismay over losing a friend, and a potential witness’s uncertainty about what she saw. These vignettes evoke details of life on the northern Russian peninsula, particularly emphasizing gender, cultural, socioeconomic, and generational divides. Kadushin’s pronunciations of the non-English words enhance the setting, and her delivery of the dialogue flows at a natural tempo. C.B.L. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

★ 2019-01-21

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 map—you'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 worry—will 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.