Zoya, the wife of a police detective, is home alone with a new baby: “She was not a woman made for sitting home and nursing. She thinks the following about their relationship: “The story of their marriage: a little love, a little rage, a lot of ocean water.”Īn underlying current of wildness unites these women and girls, most of whom are searching for something more. Katya, in the second chapter, is dating Max, a handsome but ineffectual man who has forgotten to bring the tent on their camping trip: “Max was simply the sort of person, like so many others, whom she had to supervise.” Natasha, who appears later in the novel, has a husband in the military, working on a ship, leaving her to raise their two children alone. This is a novel about women men in the book are often absent or portrayed as less than ideal. Mostly, we dig deeply into the lives of girls and women, lives that are often difficult and upset by trauma, lives that offer little in the way of hope or joy. We learn about this beautiful yet stark peninsula, accessible only by air or sea, and we get to understand the racism and classism that permeates it, the ways in which the post-Soviet world has changed the lives of these Russians.

We see, over time, as their story disappears from the headlines, as the police move on to other matters. The book then moves forward in time over the next year, each month narrated by a different woman or girl who is somehow connected to the girls’ disappearance.

They disappear from their parents’ lives and, largely, from the novel. We get to know the girls-who live on the Kamchatka Peninsula, in the far east of Russia-during an idle summer day and then watch, full of despair, as the girls climb into a strange man’s car. Two little girls-Alyona and Sophia-go missing at the start of Julia Phillips’ wonderful debut novel, Disappearing Earth.

Disappearing earth characters