But it doesn’t follow the same path other novels that start with a kidnapping might: the format itself is a twist on the thriller/investigative mystery genre, the portrayal of the useless and often misguided police officers only incidental to the much larger story told through different women in the area affected in various ways, large and small, by the kidnapping. (In fact, one of the characters in Disappearing Earth, the mother of the disappeared girls, also notes how she is unfortunately more ignorant than she’d like regarding the history of the treatment of indigenous peoples in Russia because it wasn’t in the curriculum when she was in school she notes how her daughters would’ve known more, because they’re taught in school now about the indigenous peoples of northern Russia: what is taught, I’m not sure.) Disappearing Earth begins with the kidnapping of two girls – Alyona and Sophia, aged 11 and 8 – while they were walking around by themselves along the beach in late summer. 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.I’ll confess that before reading Disappearing Earth, I hadn’t heard about the indigenous Even people of Russia, nor of Kamchatka (my knowledge of history and geography, let alone the two combined, is woeful at best), but I can say that Phillips’ beautiful rendering of the landscape of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky and descriptions of the women living in the town (or the wide vicinity of it) in the novel made me want to find out more.

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. Spellbinding, moving–evoking a fascinating region on the other side of the world–this suspenseful and haunting story announces the debut of a profoundly gifted writer.

Disappearing earth review