And in the end, Phillips brings us back to where the story began - with two little girls who have, seemingly, disappeared from Earth.I have to keep Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie series on a very high shelf, because if I so much as pick up my copy of When Will There Be Good News? I will ignore work, family, everything until I've reread it (again). It’s a detailed, beautifully written, and very well-researched novel. However, by the end of the novel, Phillips masterfully weaves them into one cohesive narrative. We also spend a distraught evening with a researcher named Oksana as she searches for her beloved dog, who ran away after her friend’s clumsy boyfriend left her apartment door ajar.Īt a glance, the snippets of these women’s lives seem disconnected. We’re introduced to childhood friends Lada and Masha, who reconnect at a New Year’s Eve party: Lada learns her friend is lesbian and fears for her life. In Disappearing Earth, she provides readers with a book that is both a thriller detective novel and an unembellished account of the day-to-day challenges faced by the women who live on this isolated peninsula.įor example, we meet an indigenous university student named Ksyusha as she navigates a long-distance relationship with an abusive white boyfriend.
This structure allows Phillips to do something unique. All of these characters are women, and each one’s life has been impacted in some (often indirect) way by the girls’ disappearance. After introducing the girls on the day of their kidnapping, Phillips spends the rest of the novel bouncing through vignettes about an array of seemingly unrelated characters. This book is centered around the kidnapping of two young girls named Alyona and Sophia, but Phillips tells their story in an unconventional way. By the time you’ve finished the book, you’ll feel as if you just got home from a long, eventful trip to a remote, wintery corner of Russia. In 250 pages, she takes us up and down the peninsula, from the rocky, sheltered bay on the brink of the Pacific Ocean where the novel starts to the snow pounded roads in the remote town of Esso where the story ends.
Phillips does a remarkable job giving her reader a sense of place. Before picking this up, I had never heard of the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia, but after reading it, I felt like I had lived there my entire life. Rarely has a book so thoroughly transported me away from my own life. Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips is the perfect novel for a person stuck at home during a global pandemic.
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