![]() They had been walking on along the beach without their mother, journalist Marina, who we meet near the novel’s gripping conclusion. ![]() ![]() Phillips’ new novel weaves together stories from across the peninsula that are all linked by an initial tragedy: two young Golosovskaya sisters, Sophia who is eight and Alyona who is eleven, are too trusting of a stranger who offers to give them a ride home from the city center. Phillips, a Fulbright Fellow and an American, studied Russian literature and spent time in Kamchatka, exploring the area during a dogsled race, and learning about the region’s native reindeer herders. “Kamchatka’s residents could finally explore their own land.” Many of the characters in Julia Phillip’s debut novel, Disappearing Earth, came of age in the time “between Communists’ rigidity and Putin’s strength,” and remember when travel restrictions were raised after Soviet collapse. Until the Soviet collapse, Kamchatka was a Soviet military zone, and the peninsula still has no roads that connect it to mainland Russia. Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky is the largest city on the Kamchatka Peninsula of Russia, an otherwise desolate area of volcanoes, mountains, and hot springs, dotted with villages of indigenous populations. ![]()
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