Disappearing Earth

Starred review from March 4, 2019
In the opening chapter of Phillips’s exceptional and suspenseful debut, two sisters—Sofia, 8, and Alyona, 11—vanish from a beach on the Kamchatka Peninsula in northeastern Russia, and their disappearance sends ripples throughout the close-knit community. The subsequent 12 chapters, taking place during the months over the following year, chart the impact of the potential kidnapping—and the destructive effect of longing and loss—and play out in a series of interconnected and equally riveting stories about others in the surrounding area. “April” peeks into the day-to-day of a policeman’s restless wife, who, while on maternity leave, is haunted by missed opportunities and “ things darker, stranger, out of bounds.” In “May,” shrewlike Oksana, the abduction’s only witness, severs ties with a colleague after the colleague’s absentminded husband loses Oksana’s beloved dog. The penultimate chapter unites some of the book’s disparate threads, and follows Sofia and Alyona’s anxious and emotionally ravaged mother, Marina, as she meets a photographer at a solstice festival who uncovers a potential link to an earlier unsolved missing-persons case and an important clue about who the perpetrator of both crimes might be. The discovery leads to a truly nail-biting climax and the novel’s shocking conclusion that even eagle-eyed readers might not see coming. Phillips’s exquisite descriptions of the desolate landscape and the “empty, rolling earth” are masterful throughout, as is her skill at crafting a complex and genuinely addictive whodunit. This novel signals the arrival of a mighty talent. Agent: Suzanne Gluck, WME Entertainment.

Narrator Ilyana Kadushin skillfully meets the challenges of this genre-bending audiobook. Set in modern-day Kamchatka, the story revolves around the disappearance of two young sisters and is told through the eyes of different women or girls whose lives have been variously affected by the kidnappings. Kadushin modulates her tone to fit each woman's age and circumstances, highlighting, for example, a young dancer's tentative disloyalty to her controlling boyfriend, a teen's dismay over losing a friend, and a potential witness's uncertainty about what she saw. These vignettes evoke details of life on the northern Russian peninsula, particularly emphasizing gender, cultural, socioeconomic, and generational divides. Kadushin's pronunciations of the non-English words enhance the setting, and her delivery of the dialogue flows at a natural tempo. C.B.L. � AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine