More on Disappearing Earth

I hope you are enjoying reading Disappearing Earth for the 3/31 discussion.  I'll be sending out the Zoom link early next week.  In the meantime, Now Read This (a book club from PBS NewsHour and The New York Times) has some great links to material about the book and the author, as well as background information and discussion questions that can all be found here.

March title

 

 

Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips

The Library Book Group will meet on Wednesday March 31st at 1pm via Zoom. Please email or call the library to reserve a copy of the book.  Also available as an ebook or audiobook via Overdrive/Libby. 

 
One of The New York Times 10 Best Books of 2019
National Book Award Finalist
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize
Finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
Finalist for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award
National Best Seller
 
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.
One August afternoon, on the shoreline of the Kamchatka peninsula at the northeastern edge of Russia, two girls—sisters, eight and eleven—go missing. In the ensuing weeks, then months, the police investigation turns up nothing. Echoes of the disappearance reverberate across a tightly woven community, with the fear and loss felt most deeply among its women.
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. 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.
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.