Review
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“A superb debut—brilliant. Daring, nearly flawless.
A crime jump-starts Disappearing Earth; the novel exposes the
ways in which the women of Kamchatka are fragmented not only by
[a] kipping, but by place [and] identity . . . Phillips
describes the region with a cartographer’s precision and an
ethnographer’s clarity, drawing an emblematic cast: a reindeer
herder’s daughter at university in the capital; a man’s
wife; the white mother of the missing sisters; a Native woman
whose teenage daughter also disappeared. As the novel progresses,
the links between [the] women coil tighter in surprising and
troubling ways. There will be those eager to designate
Disappearing Earth a thriller by focusing on the whodunit rather
than what the tragedy reveals about the women in and around it.
Phillips’ deep examination of loss and longing is a testament to
the novel’s power.” —Ivy Pochoda, The New York Times Book Review
“Engrossing: an auspicious debut novel, a literary whodunit set
in a distinctly foreign land: rarely has a novel so fully brought
to life a place most couldn’t pretend to know. Phillips immerses
readers in Kamchatka—it’s in the rich, humane characterizations;
the plot’s gentle surprises; the reminders of the past; the
rendering of the landscape. The kipping of two sisters reaches
far and wide, touching every member of Disappearing Earth’s
sprawling ensemble. For the women who occupy the center of the
novel, a sense of loss seeps to the surface, their stories
propelled by emotional experiences that are brightly realized on
the page. Phillips plots with methodical flair; the depth of her
storytelling prowess reveals itself . . . Disappearing
Earth wades through darkness with heart.” —David Canfield,
Entertainment Weekly
“Stunning . . . Phillips lets her experience [in Kamchatka]
shimmer lightly in details [of] beautifully delineated
scenes—situations strange in their specificities and universal in
their familiarity. The mystery is worth reading until the very
end.” —Bethanne Patrick, NPR
“An addictive page-turner about the search for two missing girls.
Phillips’s writing draws you in: Disappearing Earth is everything
you could want from a book and more—a fast-paced yet thoughtful
thriller full of human emotion and endurance." —Mehera Bonner,
Cosmopolitan
“Invigoratingly hard to classify . . . A dead or missing girl is
such a common device in crime fiction that its use now prompts
raised eyebrows. But Julia Phillips ingeniously dismantles
conventions. [Set] in a volcano-studded peninsula in Russia, this
novel builds a portrait of a place, as the disappearance of two
sisters shapes and is refracted through the lives of women. As
remote as this world is, readers will find it strangely
familiar. Phillips’s characters fight to steer a course between
the twin hazards of loss and captivity. Young mothers chafe at
the confinement of family responsibilities, craving risks their
older counterparts dread. For Phillips, the intricate web linking
her characters—bonds that can suffocate, sustain, or expose—is
not a mystery to be uncovered by a solitary detective. The ending
of Disappearing Earth ignites an immediate desire to reread the
chapters leading up to it . . . What appear to be fragments, the
remains of assorted personal disasters and the detritus of a lost
empire, is in truth capable of unity.” —Laura Miller, The New
Yorker
“Fascinating, immensely moving . . . The paradox of Ms. Phillips'
novel, set in one of the most remote and mysterious places on the
planet: its concerns are instantly recognizable. The book opens
with the abduction of two young sisters. Succeeding
chapters follow a diverse cast in the year after the unsolved
crime; their stories are about the unraveling of bonds: a
teenager is dropped by her best friend; a woman learns that her
husband has died in a ain accident; in the simplest and most
shattering chapter, a woman reaches the brink of despair when her
dog runs away. You wonder if the kipped girls are going to be
forgotten, but Ms. Phillips returns to their e, tying together
subtly dropped clues . . . Engrossing.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall
Street Journal
“Thrilling. . . this mystery takes you to a scrappy ice-bound
town in Russia’s frozen north. Rumors and rivalries, secrets and
lies, all add up to a compelling portrayal of a community under
siege.” —People Magazine
“Exceptional, satisfying . . . a sophisticated and powerful
literary thriller . . . a knock-out. By taking us through the
year after the sisters were kipped, character by character,
slowly spiraling back, Phillips is able to strike at so much of
what ails not only Russia but also most tradition-bound areas all
over the world today. The stitches of Phillips’s language make
you go, Damn, that’s good. And the ending can’t be described
without borrowing some of Phillips’s own language: it peels open
your chest and squeezes out the stuff we read fiction to
feel.” —Randy Rosenthal, The Los Angeles Review of Books
“Unshakeable . . . Disappearing Earth has the makings of the
thriller when two sisters vanish without a trace [on] the
isolated, punishing Kamchatka peninsula . . . but Phillips does
something more sophisticated. All the women yearn for something
more than they have. Phillips is so skilled at conveying place
and people, you can feel the chill of the shadow cast by
Soviet-style apartment buildings, smell the blood soup, taste the
burn of cheap vodka drunk too fast to numb the pain. It’s so
specific, and yet so universal. These are stories of women the
world over.” —Barbara VanDenburgh, USA Today
“Mesmerizing . . . The mystery of two sisters’ disappearance
alternately ebbs and intensifies over the course of a year, [as]
each chapter dips into the life of a different girl or woman [on]
Kamchatka. The story reads as a page-turner without relying on
any cheap narrative tricks to propel it forward, and the strength
of Phillips’s writing—her careful attention to character and
tone—will grip you right up until the final heart-stopping
pages.” —Keziah Weir, Vanity Fair
“Phillips’s polyphonic debut novel takes on the challenge of a
setting almost impossibly remote, but still teeming with people
and their troubles. Two girls disappear near the shore of the
Kamchatka Peninsula (as far east as Russia goes), and Phillips
proceeds to track inhabitants in some way connected to the crime
over a year, weaving a net as taut and intricate as any thriller
plot, but rich in detail about relationships, historical s,
and the specific and universal trials of being a woman.” —Boris
Kachka, Vulture
“Absorbing and extraordinarily well crafted. . . Set in remote
Kamchatka, a landscape of volcanoes and vast tundra nine time
zones east of Moscow, it is a many-stranded crime story. It is
also a complex portrait of clashing cultures—both white and
indigenous. In month-by-month chapters that at first appear only
delicately linked, Phillips zooms in on lives that have been
touched in some way by the widely publicized, ineptly
investigated abduction of two little girls. Phillips draws
intricately detailed characters, and we quickly come to know them
ly. Yet her primary interest is in social forces —
especially those that nurture dangerous men while devaluing girls
and women who seem too independent, too headstrong, too sexual.
Ambiguity about the es of [the girls] allows room for both
hope and dread, and Phillips skillfully spins out that
suspense.” —Laura Collins-Hughes, The Boston Globe
“An unforgettable novel—beautifully written and tremendously
satisfying.” —Elena Nicolaou, Refinery29
“Accomplished and gripping . . . 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’ novel. In fresh and
unpredictable scenes depicting broken friendships and failed
marriages, strained family gatherings, 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, Booklist (starred review)
“A stunning, powerful debut novel. Phillips’s characters [have]
deep humanity; her portrayal of Kamchatka is superb. The novel’s
many characters are introduced in the preface, which calls to
mind all those classic Russian novels with sprawling casts. But
at the same time, Disappearing Earth is utterly contemporary. Has
there ever been a novel, even by Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, set in
such a strange, ancient, beautiful place, with its glaciers and
volcanoes and endless cold? It’s a place where miracles might
happen: Phillips’s novel dares to imagine the
possibilities.” —Arlene McKanic, BookPage (starred review: Top
Pick)
“Cinematic. . . a knock-out novel that combines literary heft
with a propulsive plot. . . Phillips imagines a cold, desolate
climate inhabited by characters who exude warmth and strength. .
. Dazzlingly original.” —Sally Bissell, Library Journal [starred
review]
"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
“Truly impressive . . .transportive prose . . . A
must-read.” —Jamie Chornoby, BookBrowse
“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)
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About the Author
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JULIA PHILLIPS is a Fulbright fellow whose writing
has appeared in Glimmer Train, The Atlantic, Slate, and The
Moscow Times. She lives in Brooklyn.
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