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.
