They could be read as individual short stories, but they all link back to this disappearance and how it has impacted the people’s lives in the stories and how some of these people are loosely connected. The whole rest of the book is told with the structure of each month of the year that they’re disappeared, and it really kind of ripples outward to the community. Alyona and Sophia are sisters, and their mother is off at work, and they’re by a lake and they end up disappearing.

Mitzi Rapkin: So your story is actually about two young girls who leave in a different way: they disappear. This week on First Draft, Julia Phillips joins Mitzi to discuss her latest novel, Disappearing Earth, out now from Knopf. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in. 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.First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. 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. Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel PrizeĪ Best Book of 2019: The Washington Post, NPR, Kirkus One of The New York Times 10 Best Books of the Yearįinalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard prize

Novel disappearing earth