The novel does little to clarify how all the characters fit together. Phillips is in no hurry to cut to the chase, and the novel is less concerned with solving the mystery, and more preoccupied with bringing readers deep into the interior lives of the women who were, directly or indirectly, affected by the tragedy-like tossing a stone into a pond and watching the ripple pass across its surface. Don’t expect this book to rush forth with a brimming cup of answers. The novel breaks into a dozen story lines, told by a dozen narrators, over the span of a year, and by pivoting so quickly, the author throws the reader utterly off guard.
They’ve disappeared like windblown ghosts-lured, it seems, into a strange man’s shiny black car.įrom there, Disappearing Earth departs radically and refreshingly from the expected. By chapter’s end where the sisters had been there was naught but absence, like a rift in the world where something precious had been and then was lost. The first chapter opens with two young sisters-Alyona and Sophia Golosovskaya, ages 11 and 8-soaking up the sun one August afternoon at the edge of a bay in far eastern Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. Julia Phillips does not make it easy on the reviewer charged with describing her book. I think we can all agree that the correct response to the ending of this book is a violently whispered, “ what the fuck.”
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 provides a new understanding of the intricate bonds of family and community, in a Russia unlike any we have seen before.īeautifully written, thought-provoking, intense and cleverly wrought, this is the most extraordinary first novel from a mesmerising new talent. 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.
Set on the remote Siberian peninsula of Kamchatka, Disappearing Earth draws us into the world of an astonishing cast of characters, all connected by an unfathomable crime. Echoes of the disappearance reverberate across a tightly woven community, with the fear and loss felt most deeply among its women. In the ensuing weeks, then months, the police investigation turns up nothing. One August afternoon, on the shoreline of the north-eastern edge of Russia, two sisters are abducted.
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