The attention the police gave was disappointing and discouraging to many, and after the more recent disappearances, concerns bubble up amongst a few people in and around the area. Several years prior, a different girl had disappeared from a smaller town close by and the search for her quickly fizzled. Women’s reaction to violence brings some people together and pushes others apart. Beginning with young lovers on a camping trip, little girls who are forbidden to see each other, a woman with a scary medical issue, a mourning nurse, the wife of a policeman, a student who leaves her small town for an education…each story is separate but part of an intricate web of characters that are all connected. With fear and underlying despair due to the girls’ disappearance and the changes in Soviet government over time, we hear about people’s everyday existence. In Disappearing Earth, Julia Phillips tells us month by month, from a different female character perspective, what life is like and how the sorrow and sense of loss impacted their relationships and decisions. The community is deeply concerned and affected. Two little girls disappear off the face of the earth one day after they get into the car with a man who claims he has an injured leg. 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.Kamchatka is a beautiful, remote place on the northeast end of Russia, with limited access by land. 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.
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. 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 Kamchatka peninsula at the northeastern edge of Russia, two girls - sisters, eight and eleven - go missing.
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