To call JULIA PHILLIPS’s ambitious and globally praised debut novel, Disappearing Earth, a thriller is to capture its emotional, psychological, and political acuity. To call it thrilling is perhaps more apt. One August afternoon, on the shoreline of the Kamchatka Peninsula in northeastern Russia, two young sisters go missing. Their disappearance haunts the book and the women we meet in the ensuing chapters. The author gives us not just these characters’ stories, but indeed the feel of living in an unstable post-Soviet Russia with all its secrets, suspicions, and prejudices. Phillips will tell us how she handled such a complex narrative, where she began, how much research she did, and how she knew what the ending would be—the one we readers tensely wait for with each turn of the page.

Read more about Julia Phillips here.